My research interests are broadly in the intersections of stratification, identity and political sociology. I tend to use quantitative methods and am often interested in taking an interdisciplinary approach to examining social psychology of group based conflict. In the past, my projects have been transnational and global in scope, but more recently I have been interested in group conflict in the United States. Please use the menus below for descriptions of ongoing and past projects and for links to published works.
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This project is a collaboration with a Audrey Della Barba and Jennifer Lucas. The project is an extension of Audrey’s 2024 senior thesis project at Saint Anselm College. The paper examines the differences in support for abortion legalization among Republican and Democratic fathers. The results indicate that fathers of only daughters differ significantly in their abortion attitudes from fathers with any sons. The paper was presented at the 2025 Southern Political Science Association Meeting.
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This project is a collaboration with Carmela Amato-Wierda and Aubrey Scheopner Torres that examines the presence and development of a “science identity” among middle and high school participants in a science and engineering summer camp. We take a mixed method approach and analyze student survey responses to examine the social and educational correlates of students’ perception of belongingness in science and engineering.
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This is a collaborative project with Tauna Sisco that is informed by the group position framework and seeks to understand Republican voting as part of a racial threat response. The project uses census data to identify regional racial demographic factors and correlate them with shifts in the Republican vote share. To date, this project has resulted in two published works. We are currently working on a third manuscript that builds on the work in the second publication.
The first examines shifts in the Congressional Republican vote share between the 2016 and 2018 elections at the district-level. The paper takes changes in racial and ethnic demographics within districts (and states, where district-level data are not available), local changes in racial/ethnic educational and economic inequality, and the local concentration of occupations potentially threatened by the “Trump Trade War.” The results indicate little impact of the threat of the trade war on GOP voting. However, we find districts with increasing Hispanic economic income gains increase their likelihood of supporting Republican candidates. Districts in states with greater levels of White-Black inequality in education demonstrated significantly more positive changes in the Republican vote share.
The second finished paper in this project uses geocoded data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project to examine the association between local Black Lives Matter protest activity and shift in the Trump vote share between the 2016 and 2020 elections. The paper also examines racial background and attitudes regarding BLM and intent to vote for Trump in 2020 (using the American National Election Survey). The results indicate that, net of other important factors, belief that BLM is a violent movement significantly patterned the intent to either shift to Trump or to abandon him in 2020. We also find that districts with more BLM activity overall saw a significantly more negative shift in the Trump vote share, areas where police broke up BLM activity saw significantly more positive shifts (suggesting that the linking of Black protest activity to criminality motivated voters toward Trump). Most interestingly, despite the importance of the belief that BLM is violent in patterning individual votes, the presence of violent protest activity in a district did not significantly pattern district outcomes. We interpret this to mean that the process motivating the belief that BLM is violent is about formal and informal messaging and not local exposure to protest violence.
Doran, K. & Sisco, T. (forthcoming). “Black Lives Matter’s Role in the 2020 Presidential Election: An Assessment of Individual and District-Level Data.” In US Elections, Tauna S. Sisco et al. (Eds): Identity Politics in US National Elections. Berlin, Germany: Springer Nature
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This is a collaborative research project with Elizabeth Rickenbach and Janelle Fassi. The project began with a descriptive paper focused on trends among older voters in the 2020 Presidential Election. We specifically focus on the potential roles that Covid-19, misinformation, and Social Security/Medicare policy played in shaping older voters’ preferences. The analysis demonstrates, among other things, the importance of disaggregating older voters along racial and gender lines, as well as meaningful distinctions between age cohorts of older Americans.
Rickenbach, Elizabeth, Janelle Fassi, and Kevin Doran. 2024. “Looking Ahead to the 2024 US Presidential Election: Are 65+ Voters Really Shifting to the Left?” Public Policy & Aging Report 34(3):89-93. https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prae011
Rickenbach, E., Fassi, J, & Doran, K. 2023. “Older Adult Voters in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: The Role of COVID, Misinformation, and Policy.” In Sisco, Tauna, Jennifer Lucas, and Christopher Galdieri (eds). Identity Politics in US National Elections. Berlin, Germany: Springer Nature.
At present, we are working on extending this project to examine voting among older adults in the 2022 midterms and to examine the potential role of labor market conditions in early adulthood in patterning preferences for reactionary political candidates. -
This is a collaborative project with Aubrey Scheopner Torres, Chih-Chien Huang, and Elizabeth Rickenbach. The study showed students identical presentations on research ethics with the only variation being the gender and nationality of the lecturer. The students could not see the instructor’s face and were given no other visual cues about the gender or ethnicity of the presenter. We examined both the difference in pre and post-lecture quiz scores and evaluations of the instructors. We find that while the actual race or ethnicity of the instructor does not significantly pattern these outcomes, students who perceived their instructor to be non-white showed greater improvement on their post-test. Importantly, those instructors who were evaluated by students to be less effective and less enthusiastic, despite evidence that they were the more effective as instructors. The citation below provides the results from the analysis of the first wave of data collection for this project. We are currently examining the results from subsequent data collection waves.
Ongoing Projects
Past Projects
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Arthur Alderson and I use the Luxembourg Income Study data to deconstruct national income distributions in transitional/middle income and wealthy countries. We find that, similar to wealthier states, transitional/middle income societies are experiencing polarization. However, variation “upgrading” and “downgrading” suggests that nation specific social factors play a significant role in determining the shape of income distribution changes. In addressing the debate regarding whether or not the deindustrialization process is shrinking the middle class, we also find heterogeneity regarding the prevalence of upgrading vs. downgrading in wealthy countries. Additionally, interesting differences between the US and the UK were observed when looking specifically at female headed households. The results provide evidence that the economic experience of female headed households is qualitatively different in the US and the UK, and suggest that national contextual factors play a significant role in patterning the economic experience of socially meaningful groups.
Alderson, Arthur S. and Kevin Doran. 2010. “Global Inequality, Within-Nation Inequality, and the Changing Distribution of Income in Seven Transitional and Middle-Income Societies.” In Suter, Christian (ed.). Inequality Beyond Globalization: Economic Changes, Social Transformations, and the Dynamics of Inequality. Vienna/New Brunswick, NJ: LIT Verlag/Transaction.
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Shiri Noy and I use the Minorities at Risk data to examine the role that various aspects of globalization and development play in patterning both violent and non-violent ethnic conflict. The project considers conflict on a continuum and integrates sociological research on ethnic mobilization that highlights the role of diffusion of global culture and norms. We find that while economic and political development, ethnic fractionalization, and cultural globalization pattern both violent and non-violent conflict; only non-violent conflict is significantly patterned by economic globalization. Our findings suggest that the global factors associated with violent and non-violent conflict may differ, and provide support for the theoretical argument that democratization and ties to NGOs help to diffuse potentially violent grievances through protest activity.
Noy, Shiri and Kevin Doran. 2015. “Globalization and the National Determinants of Violent and Non-Violent Conflict” Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review 43: 27-57.
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My dissertation engages recent debates in the cross-national literature on violence that suggest that the forms of inequality that people actually experience and interpret as meaningful are not those in which the individual is ranked against all others in the state (like with the traditional Gini coefficient), but instead those in which one’s social (and specifically ethno-religious group) is ranked against other groups. Researchers in this field have labeled this form of inequality “horizontal inequality.”
The project constructs national and group level measures of horizontal inequality in wealth, education, occupation and health between the early 1980s and the early 2010s in developing and transitional countries. Using these measures the project examines the relationship between globalization, horizontal inequality, and economic production. Among other findings, the results indicate that the conclusions drawn are, in part, dependent on the particular measure of horizontal inequality employed.
Additionally, the dissertation examines the micro level processes linking horizontal inequality and social/political attitudes in the developing context. The findings suggest that perceptions of group difference may undermine social stability, but that this relationship is influenced by the particular economic, political, and ethnic context of the society.