My work moves between substantive questions about American democracy and methodological questions about how we study them. The projects below are organized around three connected areas: voting rights and electoral institutions, Latino political behavior, and race and American political development.
Across these areas, I am particularly interested in problems of conceptualization and measurement: how we define political phenomena, what evidence allows us to observe them, and how different research designs shape the conclusions we draw.
Voting Rights, Electoral Institutions & Representation
My current work on voting rights examines how electoral institutions structure opportunities for representation and how political science can help clarify questions that are also central to election law. I am especially interested in what it means for voters to have a meaningful electoral opportunity, what comparisons are appropriate for evaluating that opportunity, and how alternative electoral arrangements change the relationship between political support and representation.
Electoral Opportunity After Callais
Current research project
In the wake of Louisiana v. Callais, I am developing a research agenda around the concept of electoral opportunity. The project asks how electoral opportunity should be defined and measured, what the appropriate comparison should be, how scholars can distinguish the effects of race and party, and what kinds of evidence are most informative for evaluating representation.
A broader goal of this work is to strengthen the connection between voting-rights questions and the theories, measures, and empirical tools available in political science.
Latino Political Behavior & Electoral Change
My research on Latino politics examines why political attitudes and electoral choices vary within a population that is often treated as politically homogeneous. I am particularly interested in how identity, partisanship, political attitudes, and social context combine to shape political behavior—and how those relationships change across elections and across groups of Latino voters.
My current work extends this research across the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, with ongoing analyses of gender, partisan alignment, and the durability of recent electoral change.
“Why Groups Diverge: Latino Support for Trump, 2016–2024”
Presented at MPSA 2026; manuscript in preparation
This project uses interpretable machine learning to examine Latino presidential vote choice across the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections. Rather than treating changes in aggregate vote share as the endpoint of the analysis, I examine which factors distinguish voters within each election and how those patterns change across elections.
The project contributes to a broader effort to understand political heterogeneity within the Latino electorate and the changing relationship between partisanship, political attitudes, identity, and vote choice.
“The Myth of the Zero-Sum: Rethinking Acculturation in American Politics”
Forthcoming, Politics, Groups, and Identities
This paper rethinks how acculturation is conceptualized and measured in political research. Rather than assuming that adopting American culture requires giving up one's heritage culture, I develop a multidimensional approach that captures several ways individuals can combine cultural adoption and retention.
Using the 2006 Latino National Survey, the analysis shows that many Latinos occupy cultural positions—including biculturalism—that conventional measures of acculturation overlook.
APSA Preprint | GitHub Code | Harvard Dataverse Replication Data
“Acculturation, Identity, and Latino Politics”
Under review
This paper examines whether different patterns of acculturation are associated with distinct political attitudes and identities among Latinos. It focuses on how cultural orientations relate to immigration, political belonging, identity, and other dimensions of political incorporation.
APSA Preprint | GitHub Code | Replication Data
Related public scholarship: “Latino Support for Trump in 2024: Trends and Insights from an Empirical Analysis,” published in Political Science Now with Luis R. Fraga.
Race, Democracy & American Political Development
A longer-running strand of my research examines the relationship between race and the development of American democracy. This work focuses on political membership, representation, and the distribution of power across groups, as well as the institutions that have shaped both inclusion and exclusion over time.
Central to this work is the concept of Herrenvolk democracy: a form of political order in which democratic institutions and participation coexist with racialized boundaries around political membership and power.
Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Exclusion, and the American Political Order
Book project
This book examines how American democracy developed alongside enduring racial inequalities in political membership and power. It uses Herrenvolk democracy as a framework for tracing how democratic inclusion and racial exclusion became intertwined in the development of the American political order.
The project follows changes in political membership, representation, and governing power across major periods of American political development, with particular attention to moments when existing arrangements became open to significant change.
“Democracy for Whom? Herrenvolk Democracy and the American Founding”
Published in PS: Political Science & Politics, 2026 | Open access
This article examines the American founding through the concept of Herrenvolk democracy. It shows how the development of democratic institutions occurred alongside racialized boundaries around political membership, with particular attention to citizenship, popular sovereignty, and the Naturalization Act of 1790.
Open-access article — Cambridge University Press | DOI
“Democracy and the Power-Sharing Deficit”
Manuscript in preparation
This project develops a group-centered approach to measuring political power within democracies. The Power-Sharing Index asks whether political power, civil standing, and protection are shared across the groups that constitute the political community, allowing us to examine dimensions of democratic inclusion that conventional institutional measures may not capture.