Mobilizing Muslim Voters: How Campaign Contact Shaped U.S. Muslim Political Behavior in 2020

Campaigns often contact potential voters in election years to mobilize them into voting and to educate them about candidates and issues. This contact can be especially powerful for minorities, who tend to experience lower rates of contact. Here, we evaluate whether contact by different groups was linked to Muslim political behavior and candidate preferences in the 2020 presidential election. Contact by partisan campaigns and community groups leading up to elections have previously been shown to break the ‘‘cycle of undermobilization’’ that minorities have long experienced, mobilizing these historically underrepresented groups into politics. We turn to the 2020 CMPS, which includes a Muslim oversample, and evaluate not only which subsets of the Muslim population were contacted prior to the 2020 presidential election, but also whether campaign contact effectively mobilized then into a range of political actions and shaped their candidate preferences. We find that campaign contact was indeed an important tool in increasing Muslims’ engagement in American politics. Not only were some of the contacts effective at increasing turnout, all were associated with greater political behaviors, beyond voting. Exposure to more forms of contact also activated Muslim voters, enabling them to overcome traditional barriers that exclude minoritized communities from politics. This work has been published in the Review of Religious Research.

The Power of Choice: A Study Protocol on How Identity Leadership Fosters Commitment Toward the Organization

Identity leadership (IL) describes that the effectiveness of a leader will depend upon his capacity to represent a given group, to make the group go forward, to create a group identity, and to make the group matter. An identity leader may increase commitment among his followers by increasing the perception of shared identity and giving more weight in the decision process to his followers. We aim to explore the mechanisms through which a leader who creates a shared group identity can increase organizational commitment. In the first study, we plan to conduct a cross-cultural correlational study where we aim to test if the relationship between IL and organizational commitment is mediated by team identification and mediated-moderated by participation in decision making (PDM) and collective efficacy. In the second study, we aim to explore the direction of the causality between IL and PDM. To test this hypothesis, we will conduct an experimental study in which (1) we will manipulate IL to test its influence on the perception of PDM and (2) we will manipulate PDM to test its influence on the perception of IL. Thus, we will be able to identify the role of IL and the perception of PDM on organizational commitment. This work has been published in the Frontiers in Psychology.

Leftward March From Church: Ideology Among Ex-Christian vs Lifelong Nonreligious Americans

The nonreligious – atheists, agnostics, and nones – are on track to become America’s largest religious group between 2030 and 2040. The group’s rapid growth is largely attributed to widespread disaffiliation from Christian traditions across racial and ethnic identities. However, a significant portion of the population is now 2nd generation nonreligious, meaning that they not only never identified with a faith tradition but were raised in a nonreligious household by nonreligious parents. A significant body of work in psychology shows differences between those who convert away from religious identification and lifelong nonbelievers across intersecting identities. Yet, no work exists examining how this distinction impacts ideology or political beliefs that affect how voters’ identities interact with political outcomes. This study investigates the ideological and political differences between ex-Christian members of the nonreligious community and lifelong nonbelievers across multiple facets of identity. We find that former Christians raised in religious households are systematically further to the left across a range of issues and measures of ideology and policy positions than those raised outside any religious tradition. We propose identity threat as a potential mechanism for our findings and a promising area for future research. We further examine intersectional differences among racial groups. Our findings have implications for understanding within community diversity and divergent responses among marginalized communities. This work is under revise-and-resubmit and manuscript available upon request.

Topal, A.B. (Manuscript in progress) Political Content in Friday Sermons. 

Joo, M., Merolla, J. & Topal, A.B. (Manuscript in progress) Group Empathy and Support for Minorities. 

Topal, A.B. & Joo, M. (Manuscript in progress) Correct Voting, Social Media, and Generational Differences. 

Topal, A.B. (2025) Does the identity of someone in need shape whether you help them? Medium.

Topal, A.B. (2025) Here’s how candidates try to win before anyone votes. Medium.

Topal, A.B. & Dionne, K.Y. (2025) How can European leaders actually build support for the EU? Medium.