Professor Searing is currently engaged in two research projects. One, with Professors Pamela Conover, Melanie Green and Jo Silvester, addresses the psychology of political leadership. It seeks to identify key motivations and skills that help politicians perform liberal democratic leadership’s principal functions: regime building, governing, accountability and representation. It investigates their psychological structure and dynamics, origins in pre-career and institutional learning, and behavioral consequences. The second research project, with Professor Pamela Conover, is a study of the civic side of citizenship in the United States and Great Britain. This examines ideologies of individualistic and social liberalism in the public mind: conceptions of identities, rights, duties, and the practices of deliberation and tolerance. Both research programs combine quantitative with qualitative methodologies to address themes in democratic theory.

Professor Searing has served on the Council of the American Political Science Association and on the editorial boards of the leading political science journals and has received a number of professional awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship. When in Britain, he is based at the University of Essex, which has links with our department in Chapel Hill.