I have two research programs that represent an overarching agenda that investigates the influence of value systems on politics. First, I examine the value systems of voters as delivery mechanisms for political messages. Second, I utilize the value systems of students to engage democratic citizenship in the classroom.

Race, Gender, and Value Framing:

My current manuscript in preparation, “Black Values: African American Value Priorities and Their Impact on Vote Choice,” presents evidence that the value priority structures of African Americans differ from white Americans; it argues that candidates may leverage these differences in message framing to increase vote share. This particular research stems from my dissertation, entitled “Manipulating the Gender and Race Gaps: How Voters’ Personal Values and Elite Value Rhetoric Impact Support for Candidates,” which investigated a much broader question concerning the differences in underlying value structures of men, women, African Americans, whites, Democrats, and Republicans and the impact of value-framed messages on voting behavior. Using a combination of original data from 1500 student and non-student respondents and secondary data analysis of the 2006 Pilot ANES, I demonstrate that personal value priorities vary by social group. I embedded a survey experiment in the original data collection to examine the impact of value-framed campaign flyers on the vote intention of these different social groups. I find that when the value frame coincides with the value structure of the social group member support for the candidate increases. The implication for campaign strategy is that targeted messages to the electorate can directly affect the race and gender voting gaps. I have presented portions of this research at annual conferences of the Midwest, the Southern, and the American Political Science Association.

American politics has historically approached values as individual political beliefs, such as equality, limited government, or moral tradition. I contribute to the field by engaging a long-standing, social-psychological approach to values as an interconnected system of beliefs, Schwartz Portrait Values. Moreover, appeals to women voters regularly appear in our modern elections, but the existing research tells us little about how or why certain appeals work. I demonstrate that specific value frames are more or less effective based on the targeted voter because of the correlations between values within the system. For instance, if you want to speak to African American women and you are a Democratic candidate, use frames of equality; if you are a Republican candidate, use frames of achievement. I expect to have these novel experimental results under review in January 2018.

Trust in Government and Civic Engagement

I am executing a new research agenda to specifically test the implicit associations of value systems on trust in government. In July 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the Aspen Institute’s Wye River Faculty Seminar on Citizenship in the American and Global Polity. During this week of discussion of the critical texts of democratic theory, I considered the role of faculty in teaching civic engagement in the classroom, starting with the political value of trust in government. Declining levels of trust in government threaten democracy, and as an educator, I am in the position to empower students to challenge this decline. Public trust in government is often related to the party in power–if your preferred party is in power, you trust government more. Addressing this increasingly polarized version of trust in government is necessary to adequately address civic engagement in a diverse classroom. In April 2017, I presented a paper on the underlying value systems of those with varying levels of trust in government, using the World Values Survey. I argue that different approaches to increasing levels of trust in government may be based on one’s personal value system. Next, I wrote a proposal for a Faculty Assessment Fellowship to create a teaching-based, research design to collect data on students’ value systems and level of trust in government. As a Fellow in Summer 2017, I created this citizenship course that introduces undeclared students to the basic concepts of civic engagement through the lens of the Harry Potter series. The course includes a variety of assessment measures to track student changes in political interest, knowledge, and trust in government. At APSA’s 2018 Teaching and Learning Conference, I will refine my delivery methods with the newest research in democratic citizenship pedagogy. Ultimately, I propose a longitudinal design to follow these students all four years to measure changes in their value system and the evolution of civic engagement throughout their college careers. After IRB approval, the first iteration of data collection through course instruction is set for Fall 2018. This research is accompanied by a working paper examining the impact of values on trust in government through World Values Survey data and by a new proposal for a nationally representative survey-experiment.