Daniel Hopkins, the Julie and Martin Franklin Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the Fall 2024 Sidney Verba lecture on October 24 at CGIS South.
Daniel is a political scientist whose research centers on American politics and select other democracies, with a special emphasis on racial and ethnic politics, subnational politics, political behavior, and research methods. He is also an alum of the Gov Department, receiving his Ph.D. in Government in 2007, following a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College.
Introduced by Marcel Roman, an Assistant Professor of Government, the talk – titled “Cross-Level Nationalization in Eleven Democracies” – kicked off with an ode to Sidney and Cynthia Verba – whom Daniel recalled having conversations with and Cynthia supporting with his grad paper.
The talk – which is based on a working paper Daniel is co-authoring with Frederik Hjorth, University of Copenhagen, and Gall Sigler, University of Pennsylvania – covered the nationalization of U.S. voting behavior and how subnational voting choices are increasingly reflecting national allegiances.
Daniel presented data that analyzed the U.S. in the context of similar democracies – including the UK, Germany, Argentina, and seven more countries – to understand nationalization’s causes by measuring cross-level nationalization comparably and relating that measure to plausible correlates.
The talk was then followed up with questions. Daniel Carpenter kicked off with a query on the individual-level data presented, Stephanie Ternullo followed with a question on partisanship, and Marcel asked about how local media plays out at a cross-national level.
We also saw questions, hypotheses, and discussions from Gary King, Matthew Blackwell, and Ph.D. candidate Uma Ilavarasan. Steve Levitsky also posed a question, which prompted Daniel, to much amusement, to share his notebook from a grad course he took with Steve during his Ph.D. years.
A big thank you to Daniel Hopkins for delivering the Fall 2024 Sidney Verba lecture – the series will continue in Spring 2025.
For more information and discourse by Daniel Hopkins, visit his website here.