Jennifer Merolla Ph.D.

Jennifer Merolla is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Policy at Claremont Graduate University. She received her B.A. from Boston College in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2003. Her research focuses on the political behavior of citizens. She and her collaborator, Elizabeth Zechmeister, are authors of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public, published with the University of Chicago Press (2009). The book examines how worry about terrorism alters citizen attitudes toward politics, their evaluations of political leaders, and the choices they make in the voting booth. Merolla and Zechmeister currently are funded by a National Science Foundation grant in which they look at the effect of worry about terrorism on support for democracy across many countries, including the U.S. She also has several projects that look at the effect of campaign messages and media framing. Her work has appeared in many political science journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, and Political Research Quarterly.