Sean D. Long

This page contains a brief description of my academic publications and ongoing research projects.

Defending the Race: The Politics of White Violence in the U.S. (Book Project)

This ongoing book project leverages the research I completed through my dissertation. I argue that extremist violence needs to be understood against the backdrop of more mainstream acceptance of said violence. When Whites feel attached to their White identity, they tend to support political violence, whether interpersonal or institutional, and they evaluate institutions and political candidates according to whether they serve White interests. This process is generally similar for mainstream Whites as it is for extremists, although the latter tend to be much more skeptical of governmental institutions and political parties.

In order to demonstrate this, I rely on a mixed-methods empirical approach, combining analyses of survey data and machine learning with my own six month immersion in pro-White sub-communities. I leverage novel insights from my analysis of extremist text sources, hate crimes data, and survey questions related to White identity while also actively interacting within online extremist communities, following a process of passive observation that lasted approximately four years. I am one of few academic researchers who has spent such an extensive amount of time within hate groups without researcher disclosure, and I draw on those experiences to provide additional context and nuance for my quantitative research.

While many scholars emphasize the differences between mainstream and extremist White Americans, my research emphasizes their psychological commonalities by focusing on a sense of a shared White racial identification. By exploring how many White Americans offer support for extremist violence and situating that understanding into the political environments conducive to such violence, this project emphasizes the importance of studying extremist violence within a broader political context.

For more information on this project, here is my full prospectus.

White identity, Donald Trump, and the mobilization of extremism

For my first solo-authored paper, published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, I explore the relationship between White extremism and White identity, specifically in the context of the 2016 election. I collected thousands of blogs from a White extremist website and, using unsupervised machine learning, found significant evidence for extremist mobilization surrounding Trump’s election. Moreover, by using a survey experiment and an analysis of 2016 survey data, I connect extremist mobilization to the salience of White in-group consciousness. This paper is also the sixth chapter of my dissertation.

Whites Don’t Punish Politicians for Explicit Appeals

In this paper, published with Politics, Groups, and Identities, I worked with my colleague Charles Crabtree to field a survey experiment testing whether White respondents were less likely to support hypothetical candidates that used explicit racial cues. While we see enough of an impact to determine that respondents can tell the difference between cues, they generally do not view hypothetical candidates differently, with those high in White identity showing clear support for all hypothetical candidates.

When Do Social Media Platforms Intervene in Online Hate Communities?

This project, completed as part of my postdoctoral research with the Online Dynamics Lab at George Washington University, evaluates social media intervention in online hate communities. Our team collected hundreds of thousands of posts from hate communities on Telegram, Facebook, Gab, and VKontakte and found that even Meta rarely intervened in groups with high levels of hate speech, but that major platforms did take action after events of offline violence like the Capitol Riot. This project made use of survival analysis and a series of innovative methods to measure hate speech and operationalize platform intervention. Yonatan Lupu deserve specific credit for our work on this.

Can States Promote Minority Representation? Assessing the Effects of the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA)

In cooperation with one of my advisers, Loren Collingwood, this paper, published in Urban Affairs Review, attempted to assess whether laws like the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) could actually increase minority representation. While many cities in California have long had all-White city councils, we found that cities which transitioned to by-district elections, pursuant to the CVRA, were able to consistently increase diversity on their council, especially in areas with high Latino populations. Dr. Collingwood and I continue similar work assessing racial composition in voting districts as part of Collingwood Research.

Political Psychology, Gender, and the 2016 election

As part of Jennifer Merolla’s Gender Lab at UC Riverside, I am involved in two projects looking at the impact of the 2016 election on women’s participation in politics. In the first of these projects, we leverage interviews, survey experiments, and public opinion data to see how reactions to Trump’s victory led more women to run for office in 2018 than ever before. This project has been published in Political Research Quarterly. In the second project, we explore how feelings of anger and enthusiasm related to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton led women, especially Democratic women, to become more engaged politically.