G. AGUSTIN MARKARIAN

Hi! I’m an assistant professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. I study the politics of violence, representation, and participation in the United States, with a focus on racial, ethnic, and class-based inequalities. Across my work, I ask three central questions: Who does the state protect from harm? Whose voices and preferences shape public policy? And, how does exposure to crime and violence shape political behavior and attitudes?

 

My book project, Racial Boundaries of Protection, examines how race influences elite and public responses to gun violence. Drawing on state-level policy data, novel legislator ideology scores, millions of social-media posts from political elites, and large survey and election datasets, I show that state governments in the US are far more likely to enact restrictive gun laws when mass-shooting victims are White than when victims are racial and ethnic minorities—revealing stark disparities in whose lives the state treats as worthy of protection. You can check out my article introducing some of those findings here.

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Beyond the book, my research explores on violence explores how exposure to gun violence and crime shape civic and political life. In related projects, I study how mass shootings affect public support for gun regulation, and how crime restructures political engagement—reducing voter turnout but increasing certain forms of non-electoral participation.

 

In other work, I investigate institutional drivers of unequal political voice. My co-authored work in the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science shows that off-cycle local elections depress participation among young, low-resourced, and minority voters and reduce descriptive representation for people of color—research that has informed policy changes in New York and Washington State. Additional ongoing work uses a large, bill-specific dataset linking public preferences to congressional roll-call votes to evaluate racial and ascriptive disparities in national policymaking and the conditions under which parties privilege their core constituencies. Our first paper from this research endeavor was recent published in the American Political Science Review.

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My research appears on multiple occasions in American Political Science Review, and in American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, the Oxford Handbook, American Politics Research, and State and Local Government Review, and has been covered in outlets such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

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I’m a proud graduate of Los Angeles Valley College, UC Berkeley (BA), and UC San Diego (MA, PhD).  Outside academia, you can find me on a soccer field, a ski lift, or playing board games and video games.