Kiara Hernandez

Kiara Hernandez is a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University and a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in the Inequality and Wealth Concentration at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research interests are in political psychology and political behavior. In her dissertation, she centers ethnoracially diverse, low-wage workplaces— like those in the retail and food service industries— to explore how distributional conflicts affect worker solidarity and support for unionization and other redistributive fiscal and social policies. This is part of a larger research agenda investigating the effects of economic and political precarity on intergroup cooperation and conflict in the US. Other ongoing projects include understanding peer effects on partisan sorting in the absence of strong ties (with Ryan Enos, Jacob Brown and Soubhik Barari); worker-firm ideological mismatch amongst low-wage service sector workers as a source of partisan sorting in the US (with Danny Schneider); and the effects of political violence on status threat and perceived discrimination (with Taeku Lee and Marcel Roman). Kiara graduated with a B.A. in International Relations and German from the University of Pennsylvania. Before graduate school, she spent two years as a predoctoral research specialist in the Emerging Scholars in Political Science program at Princeton University.