Research Interests

Technology and Politics


My research advances our understanding of the political consequences of technological change, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. I examine both how citizens and political elites understand AI’s economic effects, and how these beliefs shape policy preferences and political behavior.

AI and Politics: The Demand Side

  • “Causal Beliefs and the Potential for Political Backlash Against AI” (with Sophie Borwein, Michael Alvarez, Bart Bonikowski and Peter Loewen). Revise & Resubmit. This paper develops a novel framework for measuring “causal beliefs” — the mental models people use to reason about AI’s effects on firms, workers, and consumers. Using latent class analysis, we identify four distinct belief types: Complementers (who view AI as enhancing human capabilities), Substituters (who see AI as replacing workers and reducing quality), Skeptics, and Uncertains. We show that these belief types predict coherent policy preferences and are already aligned with partisan identities.
  • “Attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) and globalization: Common microfoundations and political implications” (with Sophie Borwein, Michael Alvarez, Bart Bonikowski and Peter Loewen). American Journal of Political Science, 2025. The first comprehensive study comparing attitudes toward AI and offshoring through multidimensional scenarios that vary price and employment effects. Across all scenarios, we find that respondents are equally or more sensitive to price changes than employment shifts. While AI is favored over offshoring overall — particularly among US Democrats — Republicans and Canadians show more varied support, indicating AI is not immune to opposition.
  • “Explaining Women’s Skepticism toward Artificial Intelligence: The Role of Risk Orientation and Risk Exposure” (with Sophie Borwein, Michael Alvarez, Bart Bonikowski and Peter Loewen). Revise & Resubmit. We identify two key mechanisms driving the gender gap in AI attitudes: women’s higher risk aversion and their greater exposure to AI-related workplace risks. To establish a causal relationship between risk and AI attitudes, we further show experimentally that as the perceived risk of AI adoption increases, women’s support for companies adopting AI falls more sharply than men’s.
  • “The Coming AI Backlash: How the Anger Economy Will Supercharge Populism” (with Sophie Borwein, Michael Alvarez, Bart Bonikowski and Peter Loewen). Foreign Affairs, October 2025. This piece warns that governments risk repeating the mistakes of globalization by turning to protectionist measures rather than adaptive policies in response to AI disruption.

AI and Politics: The Supply Side

  • Causal Beliefs about the Economic Effects of AI among Politicians and the Public (with Sophie Borwein): Using parallel surveys of local Canadian politicians (n=1,100) and their constituents (n=5,500), coupled with latent class analysis, we identify distinct causal theories and document systematic differences in how elites and citizens theorize about AI’s effects on firms, consumers, and workers. We further show that these differences translate into distinct policy preferences. Politicians most often perceive technology as complementary to workers and favor long-term policy responses, while citizens are more likely to view technology as substitutionary and prefer protections against short-term harm. We also find that in communities marked by high levels of earlier exposure to technology (proxied by manufacturing decline), politicians’ beliefs converge toward those of their constituents, suggesting that heightened visibility of technological change could diminish political support for AI.

Future Projects

  • SSHRC Project – Supply-Side Politics of Technology: As collaborator on a SSHRC-funded project (PI: Sophie Borwein, 2025-2028), I am examining how political elites frame technological change by analyzing legislative speeches in the US and Canada, conducting elite surveys with harmonized items for direct elite-public comparison, and testing public responsiveness to elite messaging about AI.
  • Russell Sage Foundation Grant (invited proposal): I am the principal investigator on a project (submitted October 2025) that will field four waves of surveys tracking Americans’ causal beliefs about AI over 18 months. This rotating panel design (n=2,000 per wave) will be the first US longitudinal tracker of AI workplace attitudes, documenting how mental models evolve as AI deployment accelerates and whether belief-policy linkages remain stable over time.

Previous work

  • Automation and Policy Preferences: During my time at the University of Toronto, I led a project that investigated whether providing more encompassing information about the trade-offs associated with automation and artificial intelligence (AAI)—highlighting both its costs and benefits—influences public support and subsequent policy preferences. In additional projects with my co-authors, resulting in four publications, we examined whether citizens are as concerned about economic displacement caused by automation as they are about other labor market changes (e.g., those arising from trade and demand shifts), whether these effects vary by gender, and finally, whether such fears might generate support for populist and radical right parties.

Climate Change and Political Behavior

  • Bridging ideological divides on climate policy: I examine how economic framing of pollution as a negative externality increases carbon tax support, particularly among Independent voters, and study public attitudes toward technology-based solutions like solar geoengineering as ways to overcome partisan polarization on climate action.
  • Collective action and free-riding: Using survey data from 2,000 Americans, I document widespread free-riding on sustainability behaviors (electricity use, water use, meat consumption). I am also designing an innovative repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment with real payoffs to test whether experiencing the consequences of free-riding can enhance understanding of collective action problems and promote behavioral change on climate issues.

Explaining the causes and consequences of populism

  • I address the question of how different socio-economic crises affect support for democratic institutions and voting behavior. I studied the interaction between the Eurozone crisis and external interventions such as IMF and EU conditionality on the decline in citizens’ support for democratic institutions, and further expanded the analysis along the gender dimension. Similarly, I analyzed the political success of anti-immigration parties in Italy, focusing on the relative importance of immigration preferences vs issue salience.

Sports and Politics

  • In a paper in the journal Sociology, with my co-author Morgan Wack we developed and deployed a unique dataset of over 6,500 player-year observations from the Italian Serie A created using an extensive set of skin tone data developed to improve the verisimilitude of an online interactive game. This allowed us to uncover substantial evidence of racial biases from both fans and officials in the Italian football league. Our publication was covered by the Guardian.
  • Another project with Kevin Aslett and Morgan Wack focuses on the process of “sports-washing”, in the context of a recent example: the role of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and his ownership of Chelsea Football Club during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To answer this question we analyze tweets employing a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) machine learning model.

COVID-19

  • From April 2020 to June 2021 I worked as a research assistant on the UW COVID-19 State Policy Project, the nation-leading effort in collecting daily data on social distancing policies in response to COVID-19 in the US. Our data has been used, among others, by Tableau, Facebook, The COVID Mobility Network, IHME, the Imperial College of London, and COVID Exit Strategy. Our collaborative research effort has resulted in a number of publications in The Lancet, Nature Medicine, Perspectives on Politics and State Politics & Policy Quarterly.