Research | Allen Wilson

Research

My research examines the formation, organization, and political consequences of public attitudes. Across my work, I ask three related questions: How do socialized dispositions formed outside politics shape political judgment? How do citizens organize their beliefs and evaluate arguments? And when, through what institutional processes, does public opinion influence policy?

I address these questions through survey experiments, computational text analysis, psychometric network models, causal mediation, and multilevel regression and poststratification. These methods serve a common substantive purpose: identifying psychological mechanisms and connecting individual-level attitudes to democratic behavior and institutional outcomes.

Socialization and political predispositions

This line of research investigates how orientations acquired through everyday experience become politically meaningful. It develops measures of durable predispositions and examines how those predispositions shape both citizens’ behavior and the language political elites use to communicate.

Aphorisms and Public Opinion: How the Socialization of Non-Political Information Shapes Political Attitudes

Allen Wilson · Dissertation project

My dissertation develops familiar aphorisms as concrete indicators of latent orientations that are often difficult to measure with conventional political survey items. One component constructs and validates an aphorism-based measure of risk acceptance, assessing its internal structure and its relationship to relevant forms of political participation. The broader project considers how principles learned during socialization can later organize political judgment.

Developing an Aphoristic Home Style: How Aphorisms Help (and Hurt) in Constituent Communications

Allen Wilson · Work in progress

This project studies aphorisms as a form of elite political rhetoric. It draws on a catalog of more than 1,000 common sayings and a corpus exceeding one million congressional floor speeches from 1995 through 2025 to document their use in Congress. Preregistered experiments then evaluate whether this familiar language affects policy comprehension, persuasion, and evaluations of political speakers.

Hypercompetitiveness and Loser’s Consent

Marc J. Hetherington, Allen Wilson, Ryan M. DeTamble, and David C. Barker · Public Opinion Quarterly, 90(1), 202–217 (2026)

This article examines whether a generalized need to win at any cost helps explain support for political actors who reject legitimate electoral defeat. Panel evidence links hypercompetitive orientations measured before January 6 to subsequent approval of the Capitol attack, extending research on loser’s consent to a socialized psychological disposition.

Article

When Losing Is Not an Option: Competitive Priming and Support for January 6th

Ryan M. DeTamble, David C. Barker, Marc J. Hetherington, and Allen Wilson · Working paper

This follow-up project uses a preregistered, nonpolitical competitive priming task to investigate the causal relationship between hypercompetitiveness and support for January 6. It distinguishes a win-at-all-costs orientation from personal-development competitiveness and uses mediation analysis to examine the psychological pathway connecting the prime to political judgment.

Belief systems and political persuasion

A second set of projects studies how citizens connect political attitudes and how they respond to arguments that conform to—or depart from—partisan expectations. Together, this work treats persuasion and belief organization as related features of mass political reasoning.

Breaking from the Party Line: Understanding Atypicality Effects in Citizens’ Issue Arguments

Connor Choate, Allen Wilson, and Timothy J. Ryan · Under review at The Journal of Politics

This project asks whether arguments that depart from positions commonly associated with the author’s party are evaluated differently from party-typical claims. Preregistered experiments using arguments written by actual respondents separate the influence of message content from contextual information about the author’s partisanship, clarifying how expectancy and party cues jointly shape citizen-to-citizen persuasion.

The Structure of Belief Networks in Mass Publics

Allen Wilson and Connor Choate · Working paper · Presented at PolMeth, MPSA, and APSA

Using American National Election Studies data from 1992 through 2024, this project represents mass attitudes as psychometric networks and tracks changes in their organization over time. Measures of network constraint and centrality identify which attitudes structure political belief systems and whether those patterns differ across levels of political knowledge.

Public opinion, institutions, and policy

These projects examine how public attitudes reach government decisions and how institutional context conditions responsiveness. The central concern is not only whether policy follows opinion, but also whose preferences are represented and what consequences responsiveness can produce.

When Responsiveness Kills: Race, Racial Resentment, and Public Opinion on the Death Penalty

Frank R. Baumgartner, Ryan Brooks, Connor Choate, Elizabeth Seagroves, and Allen Wilson · Cambridge Element under contract; manuscript under review

This project examines racial resentment as a foundation of public support for capital punishment and asks whether geographic variation in opinion corresponds to the use of the death penalty. It combines several decades of survey evidence with classification models and multilevel regression and poststratification to connect individual attitudes to state-level policy outcomes.

Public Opinion and Bureaucratic Control

Mary A. Kroeger and Allen Wilson · Book project

This developing project investigates how citizens understand and evaluate federal agencies, including independent agencies and presidential influence over administration. It considers how partisanship, changing control of the presidency, perceptions of agency ideology, and issue-specific attitudes contribute to public views of the bureaucracy.

The Deadliest DAs: Inconsistencies and Inequities in Death Sentencing

Frank R. Baumgartner, Kayla Nguyen, Allen Wilson, Katrina Hussman, and Sally Stanley · Work in progress

This project studies the geographic concentration and unequal application of death sentences, with particular attention to the role of local prosecutors. By examining variation across jurisdictions, it seeks to clarify how prosecutorial decisions contribute to inconsistency in the administration of the most severe criminal punishment.