Rachel Lienesch

Rachel Lienesch is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. She graduated in June of 2023. Her research examines how identity and identity threat influence public opinion and political behavior. Her work is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review.

In her dissertation, Rachel investigated how individuals navigate two salient identities coming into conflict within politics. She uses the case of White Democrats to examine when and how racial politics in the Democratic Party might cause conflict between White Democrats’ partisan identity and their racial identity. Her results show that when the threat to their racial group is strong enough, White Democrats will react more in line with their racial identity than with their partisan one, despite having strong attachments to their party and its racially liberal values. This offers a framework that can be used to study other groups of people who may be placed in contexts in which signals sent from one salient identity clash with signals sent from another identity.

Rachel’s research utilizes a range of data and methods, including public opinion surveys, experiments, administrative data, and qualitative analysis of archival sources. In other projects, she explores how different racial contexts affect political attitudes, how partisan identity shapes non-political decisions such as ending a marriage, and whether policy extremism triggers backlash across the political spectrum.

She graduated with honors from The College of William and Mary with a B.A. in Government and a minor in Sociology.