Research

My work asks a question existing theories of political behavior struggle to answer: why do people continue investing in democracy after it has repeatedly failed them? I address this through Democratic Stewardship, a framework I developed from grounded-theory interviews with Black Americans and formalized into the Democratic Stewardship Scale, a validated three-dimensional psychometric measure capturing how people diagnose exclusion (System Blame), understand obligation across generations (Intergenerational Duty), and attach democratic meaning to participation (Democratic Insistence). Where linked-fate and group-consciousness models explain whether Black Americans participate, Democratic Stewardship explains why continued participation functions as a strategy for democratic repair.

I am testing this framework using a three-wave national panel I designed and fielded with YouGov across the 2026 election cycle. My measurement-validation article on the scale is under review at Political Psychology, with two additional articles in preparation: one examining how gender shapes Democratic Stewardship, and another examining how the framework structures Black Americans' response to the narrowing of Voting Rights Act protections after Louisiana v. Callais. This research program is also the foundation of my book manuscript, Red, White, and Black: What Black Participation Teaches Us About American Democracy.

My dissertation, "Black Racial Grievance, Black American Identity, and Black Political Participation," laid the theoretical groundwork for this agenda by developing a framework for the grief that emerges when one's racial group is subjected to racism across societal domains. My broader body of work includes research on race and religious disaffiliation, published in Advances in Political Psychology, and ongoing collaborative work on linked fate and vote choice in the 2024 presidential election.

I earned my Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and was previously a Predoctoral Associate of Research in the Department of Political Science at Duke University.