Merlin Schaeffer

I am a comparative sociologist working at the intersection of sociology and political science. My research asks how ethno-racial diversity, immigrant integration, and the gap between perceived and actual discrimination shape solidarity, trust, and policy attitudes in contemporary democracies. I pursue these questions by theorizing the social mechanisms that link individual cognition and behavior to macro-level outcomes — and by testing them rigorously through survey, field, and behavioral experiments. My current agenda centers on why citizens and groups systematically disagree about the definition and prevalence of ethno-racial discrimination, what sustains those disagreements as a structural feature of democratic life, and whether — and how — they can be narrowed.