Political polarization divides the mass public and contributes to a significant amount of social conflict within society. Those that identify with a social group (e.g. a specific political party or social class) tend to prefer policies that safeguard their own group, relative to others. As polarization worsens, it is important to understand how multiple group attachments motivate human behavior. This dissertation examines the consequences of affective polarization in the United States and Latin America. First, although previous literature documents that partisan cues prompt inter-party trust discrimination, it is unclear if these partisan effects are driven by economic divisions. In the first chapter, I disentangle the effects of partisan discrimination from class discrimination, and argues that class identity is tied to partisan identity. The results from an original trust game experiment indicate a large income-based discrimination effect. I also find evidence of cross-partisan envy -- an effect that has not yet been directly tested in the literature.

Second, I examine patterns and consequences of affective polarization in Latin America. While a significant amount of literature documents partisan dislike in the United States and Western Europe, less is known the extent to which partisan animosity exists in a political environment where partisan attachments are traditionally weak. Following recent work on negative and anti-partisanship, I argue that the mass public in Latin-American do hold political identities and that these identities have important political outcomes. Using CSES data, I show that that dislike for mainstream parties increases voter-turnout among nonpartisans.

Third, I use an original conjoint experiment and assess the limits of partisan prejudice. Current literature on partisanship argues that partisans use political identities as short-cuts and heuristics for decision-making. Following the long standing literature on partisanship, I examine the limits of partisan discrimination in a purely apolitical and altruistic domain: charities. My results demonstrate that partisanship not only influences economic and political domains, but that it spillsover into ostensibly apolitical domains such as deciding whether or not to donate to the cancer and research based nonprofits.

This dissertation examines the sociotechnical dynamics of renewable energy transition in Austin, Texas and considers their implications for developing more just and effective modes of environmental governance. While considerable advancements have been made in terms of reducing the City’s carbon emissions, their basis in the techniques and practices of petro-capitalism continues to reproduce many of the social and environmental injustices of the city’s former fossil- fueled energy system. Accordingly, I suggest, Austin’s renewable energy transition can be seen as “out of joint,” as sedimented histories of racial exclusion and petro-capitalist development continue to haunt Austin’s renewable energy transition. By studying and contrasting the various thought styles of Austin’s diverse environmental communities, I argue that Austin’s out-of- jointness and associated injustices are rooted in a misguided reification of energy systems as a distinct and taken-for-granted domain for intervention. Alternatively, I suggest an approach to “energy systems” as always entangled with other interdependent systems (social, cultural, and epistemic as well as technical and ecological). As such, I argue that part of the governance challenge of just energy transition lies in developing new modes of coordination and collaboration across systems, jurisdictions, and domains of expertise – well beyond energy systems per se.Theoretically, we need to better account for the full ecology of entangled systems involved in sociotechnical change. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork and archival research, funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this dissertation brings the specificities of Austin’s energy transition to bear on current anthropological understandings of environmental governance and sociotechnical change. The energy systems entrenched in most places today both articulate with and produce different kinds of temporalities (the grid’s 60hz, the 9-5pm work week, energy assistance schedules, our expectations for the future, etc.), many of which have resulted from and continue to be imbued with the dynamics of petro-capital. These temporalities undergird the social rhythms and patterned behaviors through which we reproduce ourselves and our environments, ensuring that change is never straightforward because of the many cross-system, ecological ways that the past haunts the present. In sum: fossil fuel energy locks us in in multiple ways – beyond what can be addressed in narrow approaches to sociotechnical change. To account for this, I develop the concept of “petro- ghosts” to think about the way petro-capitalist logics, desires, and practices have and continue to shape Austin’s emergent renewable energy system, and its discontents. I also characterize the practices by which certain communities (especially those focused on energy justice) attempt to recognize and exorcize these specters by developing alternative scales and frames of analysis. Focusing on these divergences in data practices and infrastructures, thought styles, and rhetorical modes of expression among energy transition advocates, I identify how these influence the scales and systems that different communities deem relevant to energy transition and appropriate for organized interventions. Inversely, I also take note of the systems different communities sideline as irrelevant, invaluable, risky, or simply too inveterate to warrant their attention. I draw on this data to demonstrate how Austin’s current model of environmental governance is linked to deep seated investments in technocratic ideologies and expertise, ideologies that have attained a sense of inevitability and “realism” in the city, in part, through their sedimented influence on daily life in Austin. As a result, resistance involves a widening of the range of knowledge and expertise considered relevant to just energy transitions, and to the development of new public data capacities to uncover, recognize, and excise remnants of Austin’s petro-racial capitalist pasts. Drawing upon these knowledge production and ethical practices, I suggest the potential to bolster these efforts by adapting collaborative, community-engaged ethnographic methods towards the development of just transition strategies, for Austin and elsewhere.

Previous literature has investigated how coalition parties diverge ideologically during elections while converge in-between elections. However, less attention has been devoted to the ideological convergence of co-governing parties in the long term. Using data from 36 parliamentary democracies in the 1948-2019 period, I demonstrate that cabinet parties tend to converge ideologically across elections. I claim that such strategic behavior is due to the coalition bargaining process and the design and implementation of common public policies that pushes parties to internalize diverse views. Additionally, I show that parties’ relative size—a variable until now neglected by the literature—is also associated with such convergence. Specifically, as the difference of vote share between parties increases, we observe higher levels of ideological convergence regardless of cabinet/opposition membership. This suggests that smaller parties have incentives to adopt policies that have proven popular when implemented by mainstream parties.

Small molecule drugs target many small molecule metabolic enzymes in humans and pathogens, often mimicking endogenous ligands. The effects may be therapeutic or toxic, but are frequently unexpected. A large-scale mapping of the intersection between drugs and metabolism is needed to better guide drug discovery. To map the intersection between drugs and metabolism, we have grouped drugs and metabolites by their associated targets and enzymes using ligand-based set signatures created to quantify their degree of similarity in chemical space. The results reveal the chemical space that has been explored for metabolic targets, where successful drugs have been found, and what novel territory remains. Chemical similarity links between drugs and metabolites predict potential toxicity, suggest routes of metabolism, and reveal drug polypharmacology. To aid other researchers in their drug discovery efforts, we have created an online resource of interactive maps linking drugs to metabolism that enable easy navigation of the vast biological data on potential metabolic drug targets and the drug chemistry currently available to prosecute those targets. Thus, this work provides a large-scale approach to ligand-based prediction of drug action in small molecule metabolism.

Furthermore, this work challenges a fundamental dogma in modern molecular biology - the presumption that individual protein structural and chemical requirements are the dominant constraints in small molecule metabolic enzyme evolution. We directly test that assumption by weighing the absolute and relative constraints imposed by structural homology, metabolic pathway context, and transcriptional coregulation. We believe this work is the first to explicitly argue - from the molecular level perspective of genomic data - that selection constrains enzyme evolution as much at the level of metabolic pathway organization as it does at the level of individual protein structure.