Current Projects (Updated July 2010)

An Awkward Parternship: Irish-American Organizations and the Republican Movement after the Belfast Agreement (Field research under way).
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid over the last two decades to the role of Irish-America in the Northern Ireland conflict and the impact of Irish-Americans and Irish-American organizations on the peace process. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the role of such groups in the decade following the Belfast Agreement and the extent to which their activities have contributed to the establishment of a sustainable peace. In this project, I examine the nature of the relationship between Republican political parties and movements in Northern Ireland and Irish-American organizations in the United States, and how those relationships have affected and been affected by the ongoing peace process over the last decade. The study is based on field research being conducted in the United States and Northern Ireland during the spring and summer of 2010.

No Sympathy for Terrorists (Unless We Agree with Them): American Public Attitudes toward Terrorists and Terrorist Organizations (Under review).
In this paper, I show that the American public has an ambivalent attitude toward terrorism, political violence, and specific terrorist groups. While the public as a whole cannot be said to embrace terrorism or groups that employ such methods, a generally small but not insignificant percentage of the American public also acknowledges that there are circumstances under which terrorism or other forms of politically motivated violence may be justified. There is also a recognition that terrorists may have legitimate grievances that justify their actions, and that those motivations differentiate violent political activists from common criminals. This may explain the low but meaningful levels of support and approval which specific terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, have consistently received in public opinion surveys, even after 9/11.

Running on Foreign Policy: Examining the Role of Foreign Policy Issues in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 Congressional Campaigns (Co-authored with David A. Dulio; revise and resubmit at Foreign Policy Analysis)
While there is a long, rich tradition of scholarship on the impact of foreign policy on presidential campaigns and elections, the question of the role of foreign policy concerns in congressional elections has been left largely unexplored. In this project we examine the role of foreign policy issues in recent congressional campaigns, paying particular attention to that subset of of legislators that Carter and Scott identify as foreign policy entrepreneurs. We perform statistical analysis on television campaign advertising data to determine the extent to which foreign policy issues were featured in congressional candidates' campaign strategies, and the factors driving candidates' decisions to include or avoid foreign policy in their appeals to potential voters.