I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. My research broadly lies in American politics and political behavior, with specific foci in class and income inequality, poverty, redistribution, policing, and incarceration.

My dissertation, For Them, Not Me: Assessing the Role of Contact with Poor Friends and Family Members on Support for Redistribution, which is partially funded by the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center Research Grant, explores the extent to which contact with close friends and family members experiencing poverty or financial distress motivates support for redistribution and engenders more favorable attitudes toward those in poverty. I argue that the emotional bonds born from close contact with poor friends and family members exert a distinct and galvanizing effect on support for redistribution and improve attitudes toward the poor. In addition, I leverage three original survey experiments to test whether the effects of common mechanisms identified in extant literature (subjective status comparisons and empathy) to catalyze support for redistribution vary depending upon the nature of contact with the poor. Though I uncover no effects of downward subjective status comparisons to poor friends or relatives on support for redistributive or antipoverty policies, I find that priming empathy for poor loved ones yields greater support for various redistributive policies, though the extent of contact’s influence is conditioned upon the reason(s) for a friend or family member’s distress.

Beyond my dissertation, I have a co-authored article in The Journal of Politics examining the effect of racialized income inequality on support for liberal economic policies and am currently developing a project testing whether experimentally inducing feelings of class guilt among the affluent increases their propensity to redistribute.

I earned my Master of Arts in 2022 and my Bachelor of Arts in 2018, both from the University of California, Riverside. Outside of academia, I enjoy gothic horror, golden hour, and tending to my small jungle of house plants.

If you would like to get in touch, please don’t hesitate to email me at booi001@ucr.edu or submit a contact form. Thank you for visiting!