American Politics · Political Methodology

Allen Wilson

PhD Candidate (ABD), Department of Political Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

I study how political attitudes are formed, organized, communicated, and translated into public policy. Situated at the intersection of American politics, political psychology, and public opinion, my research addresses three connected questions: how socialization and latent predispositions shape political judgment; how citizens structure their beliefs and evaluate political arguments; and how public preferences interact with institutions and policy outcomes.

These questions motivate projects on democratic attitudes, political persuasion, belief-system structure, elite rhetoric, capital punishment, and public evaluations of the federal bureaucracy. My dissertation develops familiar aphorisms as measures of durable predispositions and examines their use in political communication.

My work combines survey experiments with computational text analysis, psychometric network analysis, causal mediation, and multilevel regression and poststratification. Collaborative research includes an article in Public Opinion Quarterly, a manuscript under review at The Journal of Politics, and a Cambridge Element under contract.

Research

Research agenda

Socialization and political predispositions

I examine how orientations formed in everyday social life become politically consequential. My dissertation studies aphorisms as indicators of latent predispositions and as a resource in elite rhetoric; related collaborative work considers how hypercompetitiveness shapes responses to electoral defeat.

Belief systems and persuasion

I study how citizens organize political attitudes and how partisan expectations affect the reception of arguments. This work combines experiments on citizen-to-citizen persuasion with network models of changing belief-system structure in the American public.

Public opinion and policy

I investigate the relationship between mass preferences and government action, including the role of racial resentment in support for capital punishment and developing research on public evaluations of federal agencies and presidential control of the bureaucracy.

Teaching and mentoring

My teaching emphasizes intellectual curiosity, analytical rigor, and the application of political-science concepts to evidence. I design courses in which students move beyond recalling conclusions to formulating questions, evaluating claims, and producing their own analyses.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, I have served as instructor of record for Introduction to American Government and Politics and Analyzing Public Opinion. I also direct an undergraduate research lab that provides sustained training in collaborative research and data work.