About

Daniel Hopkins is a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania whose research centers on American politics and the politics of select other democracies. His work places special emphasis on racial and ethnic politics, state and local politics, political behavior, and research methods. He holds the formal title of Julie and Martin Franklin Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and has secondary appointments at the School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the Annenberg School for Communication. In addition to his academic roles, he assists with the coordination of the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative. From 2014 until 2025, he was an occasional writer for FiveThirtyEight. His academic papers, curriculum vitae, and various professional profiles are publicly accessible through multiple online platforms.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Statistics
• Engineering
• Data science
• Management science
• Political Science
• Mathematics
• Gender studies
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Econometrics
• Operations research
• Demography
• Microeconomics
• World Wide Web
• Law
• Economics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• What Role Did Immigration Attitudes Play in Latinos’ 2016-2024 Swing Toward the GOP?

  2026-03-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  After the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, scholars and observers frequently characterized Latino voters as unlikely to support anti-immigration candidates, especially when immigration is salient. However, between 2016 and 2024, Latinos were among the groups that swung the most toward the GOP. Given the mismatch between Donald Trump's strident opposition to unauthorized immigration and Latinos' historically pro-immigration views, understanding the role of Latinos' immigration attitudes in vote choice in this period is theoretically important. Acknowledging that Latinos are not single-issue voters, we investigate this question using multiple high-quality, population-based panels of Latinos (2016-2024). We document a restrictionist turn in Latinos' attitudes alongside perceptions that both parties slightly moderated. We find that Latinos placed just as much weight on immigration policy in their 2024 vote choice as in 2016. Our results suggest that while immigration has not waned in importance for Latinos, changes in attitudes from 2016-2024 somewhat eroded Democrats' advantage on this issue.

  PublisherDOI

• What Role Did Immigration Attitudes Play in Latinos’ 2016-2024 Swing Toward the GOP?

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-18

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  After the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, scholars and observers frequently characterized Latino voters as unlikely to support anti-immigration candidates, especially when immigration is salient. However, between 2016 and 2024, Latinos were among the groups that swung the most toward the GOP. Given the mismatch between Donald Trump's strident opposition to unauthorized immigration and Latinos' historically pro-immigration views, understanding the role of Latinos' immigration attitudes in vote choice in this period is theoretically important. Acknowledging that Latinos are not single-issue voters, we investigate this question using multiple high-quality, population-based panels of Latinos (2016-2024). We document a restrictionist turn in Latinos' attitudes alongside perceptions that both parties slightly moderated. We find that Latinos placed just as much weight on immigration policy in their 2024 vote choice as in 2016. Our results suggest that while immigration has not waned in importance for Latinos, changes in attitudes from 2016-2024 somewhat eroded Democrats' advantage on this issue.

  Publisher

• Not of Primary Concern: Assessing Ideological Voting Over Time in U.S. Primaries, 2008–2024

  Political Behavior · 2025-06-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract America’s major political parties have been riven by ideological factions which contest for power partly through partisan primaries. Ideological factions can only be grounded in voting behavior to the extent that primary voters are consistently ideological across primaries. Yet, prior research has relied overwhelmingly on cross-sectional analyses. This paper thus provides new, over-time evidence on the extent of ideological voting in partisan presidential and Senate primaries. It first uses population-based panel data which measures the same respondents’ presidential primary preferences in 2008, 2016, and 2020 to investigate ideology’s role in stabilizing primary vote choices. Across pairs of primaries, over one third of respondents prefer candidates representing different ideological factions within the same party. To extend these analyses to Senate races and address concerns about sampling biases, it also draws on precinct-level returns in five states’ primaries (2008–2024). Evidence from these varied sources points to one conclusion: ideological considerations influence primary voting, but their modest association with vote choice and limited over-time stability leaves substantial room for other factors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Who polices which boundaries? How racial self-identification affects external classification

  2025-06-06 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This study explores whether Americans agree on the ethnoracial categories that are worth policing. It evaluates how receptive White, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans are to how others self-identify by race/ethnicity. Insights from Bourdieu on classification struggles combined with status characteristics theory and gender research suggest that all Americans will police the higher-status White category more than other ethno-racial categories. Other possibilities include White exceptionalism—only White Americans police the White category most—and ingroup overexclusion—everyone polices their own category most. In a conjoint experiment with two samples we find White, Black, Latino and Asian Americans all police the White category most diligently, i.e., they are less responsive when someone identifies as White than when they identify as Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern or North African, or, in most cases, Black. Our results reveal a consensus across Americans on a racial classification schema that reinscribes the contemporary racial hierarchy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Public Support for Cross-Issue Compromises in the U.S.

  2025-06-13 · 1 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Theoretically, cross-issue compromises can facilitate policy reforms, as multiplegroups can win on an issue they prioritize. Under what conditions do Americans sup-port them? Prior research emphasizes one-dimensional compromises or abstract sup-port. We provide a theoretical framework to understand how support for cross-issuecompromises differs from support from their components. We also generate hypothesesabout the conditions when such compromises are especially likely, highlighting ideo-logical extremity, partisan asymmetries, and moral issues. To test them, we employfour surveys (N = 5,250) fielded by NORC (2023) and YouGov (2021—2025). Overall,cross-issue compromises win substantial public support, but less than expected basedon their components’ popularity. Partisan asymmetries when respondents are askedabout compromise abstractly decline or disappear when they face concrete trade-offs.Donors show less support for compromises, as do those who lose on an issue they deemimportant. There remain demand-side barriers to compromise among an influentialsegment.

  PublisherDOI

• Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Analyzing ideological discourse even in the age of LLMs remains a challenge, as these models often struggle to capture the key elements that shape real-world narratives.Specifically, LLMs fail to focus on characteristic elements driving dominant discourses and lack the ability to integrate contextual information required for understanding abstract ideological views.To address these limitations, we propose a framework motivated by the theory of ideological discourse analysis to analyze news articles related to real-world events.Our framework represents the news articles using a relational structure-talking points, which captures the interaction between entities, their roles, and media frames along with a topic of discussion.It then constructs a vocabulary of repeating themes-prominent talking points, that are used to generate ideology-specific viewpoints (or partisan perspectives).We evaluate our framework's ability to generate these perspectives through automated tasks-ideology and partisan classification tasks, supplemented by human validation.Additionally, we demonstrate straightforward applicability of our framework in creating event snapshots, a visual way of interpreting event discourse.We release resulting dataset and model to the community to support further research 1 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Role Did Immigration Attitudes Play in Latinos’ 2016-2024 Swing Toward the GOP?

  2025-06-04

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  After the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, scholars and observers frequently characterized Latino voters as unlikely to support anti-immigration candidates, especially when immigration is salient. However, between 2016 and 2024, Latinos were among the groups that swung the most toward the GOP. Given the mismatch between Donald Trump's strident opposition to unauthorized immigration and Latinos' historically pro-immigration views, understanding the role of Latinos' immigration attitudes in vote choice in this period is theoretically important. Acknowledging that Latinos are not single-issue voters, we investigate this question using multiple high-quality, population-based panels of Latinos (2016-2024). We document a restrictionist turn in Latinos' attitudes alongside perceptions that both parties slightly moderated. We find that Latinos placed just as much weight on immigration policy in their 2024 vote choice as in 2016. Our results suggest that while immigration has not waned in importance for Latinos, changes in attitudes from 2016-2024 somewhat eroded Democrats' advantage on this issue.

  PublisherDOI

• Correction: Not of Primary Concern: Assessing Ideological Voting Over Time in U.S. Primaries, 2008–2024

  Political Behavior · 2025-08-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Calling the Kettle White: How Material Stakes Increase Ancestry's Role in External Racial Classification

  2025-08-29 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Under what conditions do Americans use ascriptive criteria such as ancestry when classifying others into ethnic/racial groups? We generate hypotheses by joining realistic group conflict theory with research treating racial/ethnic classification as an outcome. We then report the results of two conjoint survey experiments, one with undergraduates from diverse backgrounds, the other with American adults. By randomly varying whether respondents classify hypothetical profiles completing a scholarship application or an anonymous survey, we examine the factors that lead people to classify others into various groups. Our experiments show that respondents rely more on ancestry when deciding whether scholarship candidates are white. However, for other classifications, the substantive differences between the scholarship and survey conditions are small, and respondents from different backgrounds behave similarly. Stakes do matter, and they do so in a way consistent with the role of widely shared concerns about fairness and claiming disadvantage inappropriately.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Who Polices Which Boundaries? How Racial Self-Identification Affects External Classification

  American Journal of Sociology · 2025-06-12 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Monica McDermott

  Arizona State University

  51 shared

• Rafaela Dancygier

  Princeton University

  50 shared

• William Kandel

  49 shared

• Jeff Popke

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  49 shared

• Jennifer Darrah

  University of Kansas

  49 shared

• Julia Preston

  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

  49 shared

• John Mollenkopf

  49 shared

• Laura López‐Sanders

  49 shared

Awards & honors

• Phillip E. Converse Book Award for The Increasingly United S…
• Best Paper with a Pre-registration Award, Journal of Experim…
• American Political Science Association Citizenship and Migra…
• Political Research Quarterly Outstanding Reviewer Award (201…
• Society of Political Methodology’s Miller Prize for the best…