Miranda E. Sullivan

About Me

Hi! I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin studying American politics, public policy, and research methods. More specifically, I am interested in identity, racial and ethnic politics, immigration, and gender.

My dissertation research explores the role of identity and respectability politics on the political attitudes and the political behavior of marginalized groups. Leveraging a mixed methods approach, I find that respectability politics is a politically demobilizing force, limiting collective political action among marginalized groups. My dissertation research is supported by grants from the APSA Centennial Center and Rapoport Family Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Survey Research Grant.

My research agenda also includes exploring the role of administrative burdens in United States immigration court procedures and their impacts on asylum seekers (winning the inaugural ASU Award for Research on Latina/os and American Political Institutions), examining Latino identity and its role in political attitudes, developing a large language model to classify congressional bills, examining the role of crime exposure on vote switching in the 2024 election, and more.

At the University of Texas at Austin, I am a Co-Lab Manager of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab and a graduate fellow at the Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute. I served as the Director of Undergraduate Research for the Policy Agendas Project for three years, for which I won the 2023 Department of Government Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.