Research

You can find a fairly complete listing of my books and articles on my Google Scholar profile.

My major current projects are, first, a book on multi-method research with Kendra Koivu called The Practice of Multi-Method Research. This book will discuss practical considerations about how to actually carry out mixed/multi-method research projects involving qualitative methods of many kinds (process tracing, ethnography, interpretive methods, and other kinds of case studies) combined with quantitative methods from many traditions (regression and similar techniques, experiments, machine learning, text as data, and more). Throughout, we emphasize how to actually carry out the designs we discuss in practice, and we provide exercises, as well as data sets and github repositories to support self-learning and teaching.

Second, I have a project that explores, from multiple perspectives, the politics of extremism that enabled the Congressional invasions of January 6th in the US and January 8th in Brazil. In both countries, these invasions could not have happened without the decision of thousands of people to participate in breaking into their countries’ legislatures in a truly unusual and seemingly counterproductive act of political participation. What motivated this seemingly odd yet consequential choice? With various collaborators, I explore this, by extending the literature on the traits of people who actually entered the US capitol building, by analyzing a large collection of transcripts from podcasts affliated with movements central to the event, and by exploring public attitudes about extremism and extremists. Each of these designs will ultimately be carried out in parallel in both the U.S. and Brazil, but this project will also explore trans-national connections between right-wing movements in the two countries.