Allen Wilson

I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with concentrations in American Politics and Political Methodology. I study public opinion and political psychology, focusing on three questions: How do predispositions formed through socialization shape public opinion? How do citizens organize their political beliefs and respond to new arguments? And how does public opinion influence policy outcomes? I approach these questions with survey experiments, computational text analysis, and psychometric network analysis, among other methodological approaches.

My dissertation develops a new approach to studying how socialized, nonpolitical predispositions shape public opinion: using responses to common aphorisms as measures of these latent attitudes. Sayings such as “Don’t judge a book by its cover” are learned early, widely understood, and tied to general principles people use to make sense of the world. I argue that attitudes toward these sayings therefore provide concrete measures of predispositions that are otherwise difficult to measure. In one part of the dissertation, I show that attitudes toward aphorisms form a coherent measure of risk acceptance that predicts political participation. In another, I trace the use of aphorisms in congressional rhetoric and demonstrate experimentally that aphoristic language makes policy arguments easier to understand and more persuasive while improving evaluations of the speaker.

Beyond the dissertation, my collaborative research examines hypercompetitiveness and the refusal to accept electoral defeat; partisan atypicality in citizen-to-citizen persuasion; and changes in the organization of mass belief systems since the 1990s. I also study how racial resentment shapes death-penalty opinion and death sentencing, and how the public understands and evaluates the federal bureaucracy. This work includes a 2026 article in Public Opinion Quarterly, a Cambridge Element under contract, and several manuscripts under review or in progress.