B. Tyler Leigh

Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher with the Rooney Center for American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame.

My research seeks to understand how and why Americans develop (anti-) democratic attitudes using a mix of survey and experimental methods. In particular, I focus on the development of survey research methods and the role of media in the development of (anti-)democratic attitudes. Currently, I am working on a book-length project showing that Americans are becoming less tolerant of political expression because we believe social media provides too much freedom for people to express too wide a range of political ideas. I also use AI and computational social science methods to examine the effects of quasi-random variation in local news content on voter turnout and polarization between the 2020 and 2024 elections. Other projects include a series of panel studies documenting population-level net effects of social media use on political attitudes and a set of papers on measurement of anti-democratic attitudes among the American public.

I completed my joint Ph.D. in Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2025.