Allison Anoll Seeks to Understand the ‘Why’ Behind Political Participation

A question that resonated with Allison Anoll as an undergraduate is now reflected in her research as a political scientist — could many of society’s problems be solved if more people participated equally in the democratic process? 

“I said it so much that I convinced myself it might be true,” said Anoll, who joined the Department of Political Science this year as an associate professor. “That question I started asking when I was 18 is the question that I’m still trying to fundamentally answer in the work that I do.” 

Anoll has built her academic career exploring the factors that influence whether a person becomes engaged in the political world and the process through which Americans learn how to be citizens. She deploys survey research methods and tools to build expansive data sets from which she has gleaned insight into how different life and demographic factors contribute to a person’s views of government and citizenship.  

Anoll honed those skills as a doctoral student at Stanford University, where she focused on oversampling understudied populations to reveal insights that many traditional national survey samples, which are predominantly white, might miss. Her 2022 book, “The Obligation Mosaic: Race and Social Norms in U.S. Political Participation,” drew from a sample of 4,000 respondents to the Participatory Social Norms Survey, with 1,000 from each of the four largest racial groups in the United States. Insights from survey respondents were coupled with interviews and experiments to explore what the concept of civic duty means to different groups and what may drive people from marginalized groups to engage in political activities at a higher level.  

“I’ve learned that we should think of community engagement, or engaged citizenship, as working together to build communities that reflect our values and priorities while getting the democratic process to listen to us along the way,” she said.  

Anoll’s research focus was deeply impacted by the protests and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a period that found her at home during the pandemic with a four-year-old and a newborn. Connecting with other parents, she repeatedly heard how they were struggling to talk with their children about Floyd’s death and its aftermath. Fellow parents who had never asked her about her research now turned to her for guidance. 

The questions she received spurred work on a new survey focused on the politics of parenting — how parents are introducing their children to racial politics in America and how social movements can influence that introduction. That work yielded a February 2025 publication in American Political Science Review, “From Protest to Child-Rearing: How Movement Politics Shape Socialization Priorities,” and is the foundation for a new book that’s now underway. She is working again with co-authors she partnered with while at Stanford to examine how experiences with the criminal justice system shape political participation and attitudes.  

“We realized that this was a much larger idea that spans across time and can actually help us understand how politics work,” Anoll said. “The kinds of things that people fight about, the kinds of things they care about and the way that they participate in politics is not always protesting in the streets or at the voting booth, but it’s in a nursery with their child, choosing a certain book to read.” 

Formerly on the faculty at Vanderbilt University, Anoll is excited to join Duke, with its focus on interdisciplinarity, and the Department of Political Science, with its legacy of studying race politics in America. On a side note — Anoll wanted to attend Duke as an undergrad, but her parents encouraged her to attend a public school in her home state of Virginia and she landed at The College of William and Mary. “It’s very fun to get to come here, finally,” she said.  

Chair Pablo Baramendi said the department is in the middle of a transition across all its fields, and the addition of Anoll, along with fellow new faculty members Francisco Garfias and Jiawei Fu, is a major step forward to secure generational replacement and intellectual continuity in core areas of strength. "Together they are an exceptionally talented group of scholars that will make us better and raise our profile in the years to come," Baramendi said. "Allison works at the frontier of the study of political socialization with an applied focus on race, ethnicity, and politics. She bridges core areas in the study of American politics and political sociology and helps consolidate an impending generational transition in one of Duke’s core areas of strength."