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Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Predicting political behavior is a tough task in the best of circumstances, but doing so in a country as vast and varied as the United States is an extra-challenging proposition. 

But Eugenia Quintanilla, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Political Science department, takes a unique approach to the study, diving deeper into one particular aspect of why people make the political choices they do.

Specifically, Quintanilla studies prosociality in American politics, examining how a desire to help others can affect the ways in which people choose to get involved in the political sphere.

“Sometimes there isn’t a conversation about how the political environment directly shapes our desire to help others,” she said. “Or, subsequently, how engaging in political action can be understood by actors and citizens as being for other people, not necessarily for their own political advancement. My research theorizes that politics directly shapes the development of prosociality, and has downstream effects on participation. I develop a measure of this interaction called prosocial political preferences, and then study what consequences these preferences have for increasing political participation.”

Quintanilla’s research interests led her to a relationship with the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Ph.D. students in her program are paired with a faculty member at the Center for Political Studies (CPS) at ISR for summer research experience, and she also attended weekly workshops hosted by CPS, where she interacted with political scientists and other researchers working studying politics. Quintanilla recently contributed a piece to the CPS blog exploring and explaining the popularity of activism related to U.S. and University of Michigan involvement in Israel.

Her relationship with CPS, coupled with her research interests, opened a door to receiving funding from the Next Generation Initiative (NGI), which in turn allowed Quintanilla to pursue research opportunities she might not have otherwise. She put the funding to use to enable large scale surveys, collect multiple batches of data, and better demonstrate the validity of her prosocial politics theory and measurements.. 

“Because the United States population is so diverse with respect to ethnoracial identity, socioeconomic status, and geographic location, having more data to best-represent this diversity is always better,” said Quintanilla. “Funding from the Next Generation Initiative facilitates that. It allows me to have much higher quality data for my dissertation and better answer the questions I’m trying to answer in my work.”

After completing her dissertation, Quintanilla hopes to put what she’s learned to work in a faculty or research position that allows her to continue her work on the behavior of American voters, drilling down specifically on a few different areas of research, including researching Latino political participation in the United States. 

“I have a current project on Latino political behavior with Franshelly Martinez-Ortiz, exploring how racial attitudes and anti-blackness shape political engagement among Latinos.”

For more on ISR’s Next Generation Initiative, click here. See the links below to read more about other scholars involved in the Next Generation Initiative.

• Next Generation Initiative helps Hwayong Shin explore public opinion research
• Next Generation Initiative helps SRC researcher Noura Insolera to come full circle
• How big questions about political research drew Ph.D. candidate Joshua Thorp to ISR
• ISR helps Weidi Qin lay a firm foundation for future studies
• ISR support guides first-generation college student Giovanni Román-Torres from community college to Ph.D.