Alex Flores

Dr. Alejandro (Alex) Flores is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research leverages a full spectrum of (quantitative, qualitative) methods and data sources to examine how people feel they can relate to, access, receive care from, or feel understood by the government based on their past experiences with government. He integrates insights from psychology, public policy, behavioral economics, and sociology to interpret the extent to which the sequencing and purview of government interventions define the bounds of political community or act as running commentary on desired values from its members. This work articulates the process by which these prescribed codes of conduct politicize markers of group identity, challenging the notion that such patterning of rules, logics, and norms are ever politically neutral.

Such investigative interest motivates a current focus on different domains of daily life for segments of the U.S. electorate that use languages other than English, primarily Spanish-speaking Latinxs, and their navigation of the political world across linguistic environments. Ongoing and planned future projects include experiments testing the electoral consequences of campaign messaging in Spanish, assessing individual-level capacity to detect and correct misinformation when encountered in a second language, and probing modern-day variation in responsiveness to minority language groups by local government offices.