Raquel Centeno
Public Opinion, Political Behavior, Identity Politics
Hi, my name is Raquel Centeno. I’m a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Southern California studying how voters think and feel about parties and partisanship. I explore how these feelings are shaped by voters’ various group identities, particularly their racial and ethnic identity. My subfields are American politics and methods, and I am especially interested in subjects related to public opinion and political psychology.
My dissertation focuses on the concept of affective partisan polarization and the role that racial and ethnic identity plays in how voters feel about their partisanship and other partisans. I have also done research involving voting behavior, electoral systems, and emotions & politics. I tend to work with quantitative methods with a particular focus on surveys, experiments, and integrating computational social science methods into survey work. I love spending time learning about survey and experimental methodology and take pride in building an elegant Qualtrics survey flow.
I am fortunate to be the recipient of multiple grants for my research in this area including receiving the Rapoport Family Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant being named a 2022-2023 APSA Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior (EPOVB) Fellow. I have also benefitted from doing collaborative research with practitioners to study the impacts of voting system reform on voter psychology.
Prior to USC, I completed my BA in Political Science at California Lutheran University in 2018. I have also been an instructor in American politics at Occidental College. Outside of academic work I have also served as a Research Associate at The Center for Election Science where I was able to apply my survey and experimental research skills to understanding how voters think about electoral systems and ballot initiatives. I also regularly engage in academic political polling, including doing work on the USC Schwarzenegger Institute’s California Issues Poll and the CSU Long Beach Center for Urban Politics and Policy’s California Elections and Policy Poll.
Outside academic work I enjoy group fitness classes and running, playing video games on my Nintendo Switch, cooking, going to farmer’s markets, and spending time with my cat Xochi.
If you are someone interested in political science as a field, wondering what graduate school is like, or even thinking about USC as a grad school option, feel free to reach out to me via email! I’m always happy to chat.
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