Research
I am a political and cultural sociologist who studies how culture affects political attitudes and behaviors. I use qualitative and computational methods to explore three main streams of research. First, I study the supply-side of electoral politics: my dissertation examines the work of high-profile political strategists and other campaign operatives in crafting narratives of political leadership for unconventional presidential candidates. Second, I focus on the demand-side of (non)institutional politics by analyzing various forms of political participation, such as youth activism and political consumerism. Third, I analyze the explanatory power of culture by exploring different aspects of culture and cognition, including implicit biases and the mechanisms of frame resonance.
The Supply-Side of Electoral Politics: Political Strategists and the Scripts of Presidential Leadership
Lamont, Michèle, Bo Yun Park, and Elena Ayala-Hurtado. 2017. “Trump’s Electoral Speeches and His Appeal to the American White Working Class.” The British Journal of Sociology 68:S153-180.
• Among the top 20 most downloaded British Journal of Sociology articles of 2017.
• Featured in The New York Times.
Lamont, Michèle, Bo Yun Park, and Elena Ayala-Hurtado. 2017. “What Trump’s Campaign Speeches Show About His Lasting Appeal to the White Working Class.” Harvard Business Review.
Park, Bo Yun. “Crafting the Message: The Data Science Behind U.S. Presidential Elections.” Work Under Review.
• Best Student Paper Award, Honorable Mention, Communication, Information, Technologies and Media Sociology (CITAMS) Section,
American Sociological Association, 2021.
• Featured on the main panel of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Cambridge conference.
Park, Bo Yun. “Looking (Too) Presidential? The Changing Scripts of Presidential Leadership, 1995-2020.” Manuscript Available.
Park, Bo Yun. “Is S(H)e Presidential? The Gendered Perceptions of Authenticity.” Work in Preparation.
The Demand-Side of (Non)Institutional Politics: Youth Political Participation and Racialized Political Consumerism
Park, Bo Yun. 2019. “Racialized Political Consumerism in the United States.” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism, ed. Magnus Boström, Michele Micheletti, and Peter Oosterveer. Oxford University Press, Chapter 32, pp. 681–698.
Klemenčič, Manja, and Bo Yun Park. 2018. “Student Politics: Between Representation and Activism.” in The Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education, ed. Brendan Cantwell, Hamish Coates, and Roger King. Edward Elgar Publishing, Chapter 26, pp. 468-686.
Park, Bo Yun. “Our Voices Do (Not) Matter: Political Repertoires of College Students Within and Across Institutional Settings.” Work Under Review.
Park, Bo Yun. “Suited for the Job? Elite Millennials’ Evaluations of Presidential Leadership in Trump’s and Macron’s Era.” Manuscript Available.
The Explanatory Power of Culture: Culture and Cognition
Park, Bo Yun, Adrien Abecassis, and Manon Revel. 2021. “Varieties of Resonance: The Subjective Interpretations and Utilizations of Media Output in France.” Poetics 88:101597.
Lamont, Michèle, Laura Adler, Bo Yun Park, and Xin Xiang (equal authorship). 2017. “Bridging Cultural Sociology and Cognitive Psychology in Three Contemporary Research Programmes.” Nature Human Behaviour 1:866-872.
Park, Bo Yun (with Carolina Nobre and Hanspeter Pfister - Harvard Data Science Initiative). “Seeing is Believing? How Data Visualization Affects Trust in Science During the COVID-19 Crisis.” Work in Preparation.