Jeremy Boo

I am a comparativist who studies political membership and political behavior. My research examines how institutions and political beliefs shape who people see as members of a political community, what they expect from public authority, and what they believe members owe one another.

In my dissertation, I leverage Thailand’s military conscription lottery to study how military service shapes citizens’ relationships with the nation and the state. I argue that conscription may produce nationals, not citizens: individuals who become more attached to the national community even as they become less trusting of the institutions that govern in its name. The broader project examines why institutional encounters can have distinct and separable consequences for national attachment, institutional trust, and civic behavior.

My research spans comparative and American politics, combining natural experiments, behavioral and survey experiments, qualitative fieldwork, and historical analysis. My other projects examine immigration politics among Latino Americans and the legacies of racialized state violence in the United States.