How do problems like poverty and poor mental health shape the ways in which ordinary citizens think about and engage with politics? What consequences do these social and economic inequalities have for how citizens are represented in the political process? And to what extent can government action ameliorate these problems?

These questions guide my research on political behavior, representation, and public policy. Currently, I am working on projects that explore the political consequences of depression, assess why welfare policies fail to alleviate poverty in the United States, and examine how stress and the demands of everyday life affect civic engagement.

Before coming to Tennessee, I was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. I earned a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. from Christopher Newport University. In the summer of 2018, I was a research fellow at the Universities of Mainz and Münster.

You can find more information about me on the Scholars Strategy Network and information about how to replicate my research on my Harvard Dataverse page. Links to published and working papers are listed below.

Publications

1. Federalism and the Racialization of Welfare Policy
   Christopher Ojeda, Anne Whitesell, Michael Berkman, and Eric Plutzer
   State Politics and Policy Quarterly (forthcoming)

2. A Healthy Democracy? Evidence of Unequal Representation across Health Status
   Juliana Pacheco and Christopher Ojeda
   Political Behavior (2019)

3. Intersectionality, Depression, and Voter Turnout
   Christopher Ojeda and Christine Slaughter
   Journal of Health Policy, Politics, and Law (2019)

4. Measuring Complex State Policies: Pitfalls and Considerations, with an Application to Race and Welfare Policy
   Eric Plutzer, Michael Berkman, Jakes Honaker, Christopher Ojeda, and Anne Whitesell
   Policy Studies Journal (2019)

5. The Two Income-Participation Gaps
   Christopher Ojeda
   American Journal of Political Science (2018)
   *News coverage: Brookings Institute, Scholars Strategy Network

6. Health and Voting in Young Adulthood
   Christopher Ojeda and Julianna Pacheco
   British Journal of Political Science (2017)
   *News coverage: Journalist’s Resources

7. The Social Network Clustering of Sexual Violence Experienced by Adolescent Girls
   Holly Shakya, Christopher Fariss, Christopher Ojeda, Anita Raj, and Elizabeth Reed
   American Journal of Epidemiology (2017)

8. Accounting for the Child in the Transmission of Party Identification
   Christopher Ojeda and Pete Hatemi
   American Sociological Review (2015)
   *News coverage: Chicago Tribune, CNN, Pacific Standard, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Slate Magazine, Star Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, U.S. Today, Vox
   

9. Depression and Political Participation
   Christopher Ojeda
   Social Science Quarterly (2015)
   *News coverage: Commonweal, Journalist’s Resources
   *Honorable mention in the DC-AAPOR and PANJ-AAPOR Student Paper Competitions
   

10. The Effects of 9/11 on the Heritability of Political Trust
    Christopher Ojeda
    Political Psychology (2014)
    *Winner of the AAPOR Seymour Sudman Student Paper Competition

working papers

• Child Perception and Motivation in the Political Socialization Process, invitation to revise and resubmit
  Peter Hatemi and Christopher Ojeda

• What Do Parents Know? Parental Perception in Political Socialization, under review
  Christopher Ojeda and Peter Hatemi

• The Political Opinions of Virtual Assistants, under review
  Christopher Ojeda

• Income, Political Participation, and the Demands of Everyday Life, in progress
  Christopher Ojeda

• Depression and the Motivation to Participate, in progress
  Claudia Landwehr, Luca Bernardi, and Christopher Ojeda