CSAP Welcomes New Research Postdoctoral Associates, Al Fang and Andrew Gooch

Albert (Al) Fang and Andrew Gooch joined the research faculty at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies as Postdoctoral Associates working with Professors Alan Gerber and Greg Huber at the Center for the Study of American Politics. Their one-year appointments will span the 2015-2016 academic year.

Albert Fang received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2015.  His areas of specialization are in political representation, intergroup relations and identity politics, political behavior, and political psychology.  He is also interested in methodology with a focus on causal inference, experiments, and applied econometrics.  Read more….

Andrew Gooch received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015. His research interests include elite communications, public opinion, framing effects, voting behavior, experimentation, and survey methodology. His current work explores the importance of elite rhetoric in shaping public opinion despite the fact that party identification operates as an efficient cue for most voters. His work shows that the role of elite rhetoric on public opinion is more than just simple cues. Elites must justify their issue positions with coherent content in order to generate support, and in this way, elites can amplify the role that party identification has on shaping attitudes about issues. His work also explores how candidates use emotional stories about citizens to personalize an issue. Through a series of experiments, he demonstrates that personalized stories about voters, not abstract arguments, can lead to more favorable evaluations of the candidates telling the stories. Andrew’s work has appeared in Research and Politics, and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties.  Read more….