Field:
    American Politics, Race and Ethnic Politics, Political Methodology

Dissertation Title:
    The structure and effects of Spatial Impact: A theory of contextual influence on individual political behavior

Committee:
    Lynn Vavreck (Chair), Jeff Lewis, David Sears, John Zaller, and Michael Shin

Date of Completion: June 2010

Contact Information:
    Ryan D. Enos
    UCLA Political Science Department
    4289 Bunche Hall
    Los Angeles, California 90095-1472
    Phone: 310-825-4331
    Fax: 310-825-0778

 Curriculum Vitae:
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Dissertation Summary:
    My dissertation is about the impact of the spatial relationship of groups on individual political behavior and attitudes. Spatial relationship means how two or more groups are geographically arranged. Are the groups close together in distance? Is each group tightly clustered or spread out? Is one group larger than the other?

    My study is situated in the political science literature of contextual effects, that is how context affects individual political behavior, e.g., does the neighborhood in which a person lives affect whether that person votes? My innovation to this literature is that I explicitly consider spatial relationships, while previous studies have only considered aspatial measures of context. For example, previous studies might ask what proportion of a city is African American. I ask, not only that, but do African Americans live close to other African Americans than to other groups? I ask how groups are arranged in space. I hypothesize that spatially segregated groups will manifest feelings of greater political competition and therefore greater political participation by individual members. This is accompanied by increased negative attitudes towards the other group

    My contribution brings a new theoretical framework and measurement innovation to the study of contextual effects in political science. Additionally, because my theory speaks most clearly in regard to racial groups, it has implications for the consequences of the very important socio-political phenomenon of residential racial segregation in the United States and also for understanding the causes of individual racial attitudes.

Research Interests:
    Political Behavior (voting behavior, contextual influences), Race and Ethnic Politics (racial attitudes, racial threat), Urban Politics, Political Psychology, Political Geography, and Experiments in political science.

Teaching Interests:
    Political Behavior (undergraduate and graduate), Introductory American politics, Urban politics, Racial Politics (undergraduate and graduate), Political geography research methods (graduate), Research design (undergraduate and graduate), Political psychology, and Political geography (undergraduate).