Claire M. Gothreau

I am a political psychologist who primarily focuses on gender through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates insights from fields including social psychology, political behavior, the life sciences, and philosophy. My research is organized around an overarching question: How do social identities, lived experiences, and individual dispositions impact political attitudes and behavior? I am particularly interested in how the experiences of citizens from historically underrepresented groups affect their engagement in politics and potentially create gaps in political participation that threaten the health of democracy, primarily in the U.S. but also extending to comparative cases around the world. I use a variety of data sources and innovative methods motivated by the questions I am interested in answering, including cross-national surveys, online and lab experiments, qualitative interviews, and physiological data. My current research focuses on demand-side bias against political candidates based on descriptive identities like gender, race, and body weight. My work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Nature Human Behavior,  Journal of Experimental Political Science, Politics & Gender, Politics and the Life Sciences, Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Frontiers in Political Science, and the European Journal of Politics and Gender.