Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

"Popularizing Grief: Tragedies and Tragic Events in Ancient Athens." The Korean Review of Political Thought 25(2): 9 - 38. (with Nam-kook Kim)

Under Review

"Mapping the Spectrum of Conceptions of Democracy in the United States." (Under Review)

"Democracy for True Americans: Variations in Citizenship Norms and Democratic Norm Support" (with Yujin J. Jung) (Under Review)

"Alternative Democratic Visions or Diffuse Dissatisfaction? Rethinking Populist Supporters' Conceptions of Democracy" (with Jeong-ho Choi) (Under Review)

Selected Working Papers

"50 States, 50 Democracies: Variations in Conceptions of Democracy Across 50 U.S. States" (Presented at APSA 2025 & MAPOR 2025)

• That American democracy is in crisis is a common refrain. While democratic institutions and norms are being challenged at the federal level, public perceptions of the state of American democracy call for a more granular diagnosis. Using an original dataset of 25,902 respondents drawn from representative samples in all 50 American states and DC, I explore whether and how the American public's conceptions of democracy vary within and across states. Drawing on 18 indicators of democratic norms, I employ latent profile analysis to identify the array of conceptions of democracy held by citizens of each state. To assess the level of polarization in how state citizens conceptualize democracy, I use measures of concentration and dispersion. My findings show that while both quality and intensity of competition among conceptions of democracy vary across states, prevailing typologies of political culture-regions offer limited explanatory power for these patterns. These findings provide the first systematic portrait of subnational variations in conceptions of democracy in the United States, laying the groundwork for future research on polarization, political culture, regional stratification, and the resilience of American democracy.

"What Makes Independents Independent? Norms, Values, and Democratic Commitments" (Presented at SPSA 2026 & EPOVB 2026)

• Partisan independents constitute a growing share of the American electorate, yet scholarship has paid comparatively little attention to the normative foundations of their political identity. Which democratic norms do independents prioritize, and which value commitments distinguish them from partisans—and from one another?  Using novel, nationally representative survey data of American adults with 18 distinct democratic norm variables, I examine the underlying value structures that differentiate partisans, independent leaners, and pure independents. The analysis reveals that self-identified independents anchor their political identity in a distinct and coherent set of democratic value propositions that set them apart from partisans. Moreover, consistent with prior research, I find that leaners and pure independents—often grouped under a single label—are differentiated by the normative commitments that shape their political identity. These findings advance our understanding of the ideological and normative diversity within the independent electorate and contribute to broader debates about the role of values in structuring political behavior in the United States.

"Democratic Backsliding as Political Information: How the News Media Transforms Its Portrayal of Democracy Over Time." (with Jeong-ho Choi) (Presented at APSA 2024 Political Communication Pre-conference)

• Text-as-data offers innovative methods for evaluating how news media construct and transform political narratives. However, methodological advancements are only as valuable as the theoretical foundations that guide the analysis. This study advances a theory-driven approach to analyze how news media construct and contest the meaning of democracy over time. We develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes among competing models of democracy and introduce an original dictionary that links democratic narratives to normative ideals and institutional practices. To operationalize the framework, we demonstrate how A-La-Carte word embedding regression can be used as a tool for estimating the prevalence and evolution of theoretically grounded political narratives in large text corpora. As an illustrative application, we analyze two decades’ worth of New York Times op-ed texts to show how democratic narratives shift in response to major political shocks. The results show that news media systematically shift the meaning of democracy over time by emphasizing different democratic models in response to political events. These shifts reflect not only changing judgments about how democracy is performing, but also changes in the normative standards used to define what democracy is and ought to be. Importantly, these narrative changes cannot be captured by measures focused solely on institutional conditions or factual developments. By separating the measurement of democratic meaning, this study offers a generalizable approach for detecting how media narratives redefine democracy across time, contexts, and sources.

Selected Works-in-Progress

"What Does Democracy Mean When My Neighbors Don't Like It: Two Cases in East Asia" (Fieldwork in South Korea and Taiwan, Summer 2026)

"Indecisive for a Reason: Temporal Variations in Democratic Norm Attitudes Among American Independents"