Alexander Agadjanian is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include race and identity, political psychology, and political behavior, largely in the United States.
His core dissertation work centers on the intersection of politics and “racial fluidity,” which reconceptualizes racial identity as flexible and responsive to external factors. Focusing on rapidly growing groups with ambiguous positions in the racial hierarchy such as Hispanic and multiracial Americans, he explores changes in racial identification, how sociopolitical factors can shape this identity change, and what a bidirectional relationship between politics and racial identity means for how we understand group politics and American society. In doing so, he connects long-appreciated ideas about the social construction of race with a quantitative micro-level lens, studying these topics with a variety of methods such as surveys, experiments, voter registration files, Census microdata, and more.
Alexander’s work has appeared in publications like the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, and Public Opinion Quarterly, and outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and New York Magazine
Major(s): PhD Candidate, Political Science