Book Project – Who Remembers Best? The Politics of Memory in the New Era of Right-Wing Populism
Under the fourth wave of right-wing populism, characterized by the mainstreaming and the normalization of right-wing populist parties, historical memory has become a symbolic battlefield over who belongs in the nation and who does not.
My dissertation and book project, Who Remembers Best? The Politics of Memory in the New Era of Right-Wing Populism seeks to understand how elected officials from both right-wing populist and mainstream parties (re)construct the past in the context of memory battles. As part of my dissertation, I visited over 50 historic sites in Paris, Southeastern France and South Carolina, and I conducted over 100 interviews (80 of them semi-structured) with local elected officials, state representatives, national elected officials, political advisors, as well as bureaucrats and cultural actors in history museums, foundations, and memory associations.
My research has been supported by the Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship, the Graduate Research in the United States Fellowship, the BU Center for Innovation in Social Science, the Humane Studies Fellowship, as well as the Howard Zinn Graduate Fund for Studies of Democracy.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Does politics drive cultural preferences? Voting behavior in the Eurovision Song Contest? (with Taylor Boas), European Political Science Review (2026)
Abstract
In the context of growing polarization and culture war conflict, politics is often seen as invading cultural spaces such as sports and popular music. An example is the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), where political attitudes toward participant countries are thought to influence outcomes. In this study, we administer an online survey in four European countries to examine voting behavior in the ESC. Unlike existing studies, our individual-level data allow us to distinguish political influences on ESC voting behavior from cultural attitudes and song quality. We show that most voting in the contest is idiosyncratic, not political. Political attitudes, cultural attitudes, and song quality all influence ESC voting behavior, but effects and explained variance are small. Moreover, political attitudes only influence voting for those countries—Ukraine and Israel—whose policies generate strong opinions. The results suggest that, even in polarized contexts, cultural preferences are still primarily about aesthetics rather than politics.
“I Think Therefore I Don’t Vote”: discourses on abstention, distrust and twitter politics in the 2017 French presidential election (with Joseph Downing), French Politics (2022)
Abstract
Advanced democracies increasingly face three interrelated challenges: new media technologies, increased political distrust and decreasing voter participation. During the 2017 French presidential election, all three were enmeshment while France witnessed its highest voter abstention rate since 1969. The Twitter hashtag #SansMoile7Mai (#WithoutMeMay7) emerged in the social media debate about abstention between the two rounds of the election, offering new insights into self-expression of abstention. Posing the research question “What discourses about voter abstention coalesce around the hashtag #SansMoile7Mai on social media during the 2017 French presidential election?”, this paper seeks to use the aforementioned case study to understand public discourse about voter abstention in the new digital era. By applying a multi-methods approach (social network analysis, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis) to texts from #SansMoile7May, the results demonstrate that discourses around abstention conveyed significant distrust in contemporary French democracy and raised allegations of voter manipulation, expressing opposition to incoming president Emmanuel Macron as a product of an oligarchical system while—surprisingly—showing little opposition to the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. These findings suggest that public discourse about the trust in French democracy in certain populations is problematic, where self-expression on social media about abstention was an “active” form of protest against a system seen as corrupt and manipulated. This raises important questions about the new intersections between social media protest, discourses about voting and the durability of contemporary democratic systems.
