The North Texas Research Coalition
The North Texas Research Coalition (NTRC) is dedicated to supporting collaboration between political science, public administration, and public policy scholars across North Texas with the aim of leveraging regional resources to facilitate generation of high-quality, collaborative research and disseminate findings to improve the impact of that work across academia and the wider Texas region.
Coordinating Research for a Brighter Tomorrow
The NTRC is committed to fostering meaningful collaboration on research across a wide array of different subject areas. We bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds at the preeminant research institutions in North Texas to address complex challenges in the world around us. Our aim is to provide a platform for researchers to connect, share ideas, and work together on interdisciplinary projects, through which, we can advance knowledge and address real-world problems. Join us in our pursuit of research and discovery.
What is the NTRC?
The NTRC is centered around the social sciences, particularly scholars who focus on Public Policy, Political Science, Planning, and Public Administration, but we are non-exclusive and welcome participants from any discipline. If you are a researcher from North Texas and want to get involved, we would love to have you.
Membership is voluntary, free, and open to anyone from North Texas who either works in these areas or would like to collaborate with scholars that do. While we may open the NTRC up to a wider scope of disciplinary scholar in the future given the highly interdisciplinary nature of our core areas, at present we remain focused on this subset of social science as we establish our presence and build out our network.
It's worth asking what you should you expect to get out of the NTRC. Most of you are doubtless already pressed with high service loads and we do not want to add to that problem. The NTRC is designed to offer three main things to members: first, opportunities to connect with researchers that promote collaboration among peers. We want to overcome the siloization among universities that makes it difficult to locate potential research partners at other institutions. Getting involved in the NTRC will help you find out whether there are other researchers nearby who work in the same area as you (or in an area that might be complementary to your work), who they are, and (hopefully) whether they are interested in collaborating on a project.
Second, the NTRC is designed to help promote and disseminate members' scholarly contributions. A lot of great research gets done in North Texas and we want to make sure it is read, appreciated, and put to good use, particularly for junior members of the coalition. The NTRC creates opportunties for members to visit other universities in the region and share their explorations with like-minded scholars through the NTRC speaker series as well as providing opportunities to have members' work highlighted in NTRC publications such as this website.
Finally, the NTRC is meant to help reinforce the wider research community across North Texas, increasing cohesion and solidarity among regional scholars. By facilitating free sharing of ideas and intellectual resources, we can enhance the research potential of all. If you're interested in these benefits and connecting with other academic researchers in North Texas, join the NTRC today.
Recent Member Publications
Lauren Santoro
Assistant Professor of Political Science
School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences
University of Texas at Dallas
Santoro, L.R., Makse, T., & Sokhey, A. E. (2024). Linking Primary Voter Mindsets to General Election Enthusiasm. Political Behavior, 46(3), 1725-1745.
For decades scholars and pundits alike have been interested in questions about divisive presidential primaries. However, most analyses examine how campaigns cause these effects after the field has been winnowed – the implicit assumption is that negativity via events and advertising is consequential. While campaigns are likely the proximate cause of divisive primary effects, we argue that the behaviors involved – allowing displeasure with one election outcome to affect behavior in a subsequent election – demands attention to individual dispositions. Thus, we take a step back to consider what we miss when we overlook what is happening at the time of the large field, shining a spotlight on the mindsets of primary voters at the start of the process. To do so, we identify individuals who possess what we call the “divisive primary mindset,” which consists of two traits: (1) the degree to which they prefer one candidate over all others (“preference exclusivity”), and (2) the extent to which their affect for a candidate is indistinguishable from their assessment of that candidate’s electability (“wish fulfillment”). Using an original, nation-wide panel following Democratic voters from the 2020 primaries through the general election, we find that individuals with both these traits were more likely to be late deciders in the general, less likely to participate in activities outside of voting, and more likely to defect from Biden. We test the robustness of these findings to candidate-centric explanations and discuss the importance of understanding campaign dynamics in an era of hyper-partisanship and nationalized politics.
