Sara Wallace Goodman, Ph.D.

swgood@uci.edu


Full Professor

University of California, Irvine

Year of PhD: 2009

City: Irvine, California - 92697-5100

Country: United States

About Me:

Sara Wallace Goodman is a Chancellor's Fellow & Dean's Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her research examines citizenship and the shaping of political identity through immigrant integration.  She is the author of  Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge University Press, 2022), co-author of Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton University Press, 2022), and author of Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, and other venues.Goodman’s research has been cited in major news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, BBC, and The Guardian.  Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Hellman Fellows Fund.You can find out more about her work at her website or at Google Scholar. 

Research Interests

Immigration & Citizenship

Immigrant Integration

Immigrant Integration Policies

Citizenship

European Union

Immigration Policy

COVID19

Covid-19

British Politics

Countries of Interest

United Kingdom

United States

Germany

Publications:

Books Written:

(2022) Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Polarization in the Age of COVID,, Princeton University Press

COVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president’s political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health, with disastrous consequences for all of us. Health is not an inherently polarizing issue, but the Trump administration’s partisan response to COVID-19 led ordinary citizens to prioritize what was good for their “team” rather than what was good for their country. Democrats, in turn, viewed the crisis as evidence of Trump’s indifference to public well-being. At a time when solidarity and bipartisan unity were sorely needed, Americans came to see the pandemic in partisan terms, adopting behaviors and attitudes that continue to divide us today. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives—from the economy to race and immigration—and puts America’s COVID-19 response in global perspective. An in-depth account of a uniquely American tragedy, Pandemic Politics reveals how the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic has profound and troubling implications for public health and the future of democracy itself.

(2022) Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat, Cambridge University Press

What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? This book examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, it shows citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country’s political institutions. These divided, partisan citizenship norms make democratic problems worse by eroding the national unity required for democratic stability. Employing novel survey experiments in a cross-national research design, Citizenship in Hard Times presents the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of citizenship norms in the face of democratic threat. In showing partisan citizens are not a reliable bulwark against democratic backsliding, Goodman identifies a key vulnerability in the mass politics of democratic order. In times of democratic crisis, defenders of democracy must work to fortify the shared foundations of democratic citizenship.