"Election Season in a Hyper-Polarized America: Lessons from the UMass Poll"
America heads into the 2022 Midterm Elections in a heightened state of partisan polarization. Democrats seek to maintain razor-thin margins in the House and Senate even though history tells us that the sitting president's party almost always loses seats in the off years. Alex Theodoridis will share insights on this important political moment gleaned from new UMass Poll data.
This event is co-sponsored with ISSR.
I am an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining the faculty at UMass, I was an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, and I spent the 2017-18 academic year in residence at Vanderbilt University as a senior visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
My work seeks to understand the ways in which citizens interact with the political world in an era of hyper-polarization. My substantive research and teaching interests are in American electoral politics, with a focus on political behavior/psychology, campaign effects and policy attitudes. My methodological focus is on survey methodology, experimental methods, design-based causal inference, implicit measures, and the intersection of formal theory and empirical analysis. Much of my work applies new survey experimental and measurement paradigms to examine the implications of partisan identity and party cues for political cognition. I also study public opinion as it relates to a variety of policy domains, especially environmental policy.
My work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Political Psychology, Election Law Journal, Environmental Politics, The Forum, and PS, and has been recognized with numerous grants, the John Sullivan Award, the Elections Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Best Paper Award, and the Society for Political Methodology's Warren Miller Prize. It has also been featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Time, CNN, The Hindu, The Economist and many other media outlets.
I have a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a BA in English and Politics from the University of Virginia. At Berkeley, I was a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship(IGERT) Fellow. Before graduate school, I helped launch the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
