Efrén Pérez is Associate Professor or Political Science and Sociology (by courtesy) at Vanderbilt University and Co-Director of the Research on Individuals, Politics, & Society (RIPS) Lab. He earned is B.A. in Political Science and Spanish from the University of San Diego and M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. 

Efrén uses psychology to better understand the political attitudes and behaviors of different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. He conducts research on group identity, implicit political cognition, and language and survey response through experiments using latent variable models to measure attitudes, identities, and beliefs in inter-group settings.

Representative Publications

Pérez, Efrén O. 2015. “Ricochet: How Elite Discourse Politicizes Racial and Ethnic Identities.” Political Behavior 37(1): 155-180

Pérez, Efrén O., and Marc J. Hetherington. 2014. “Authoritarianism in Black and White: Testing the Cross-Racial Validity of the Child Rearing Scale.” Political Analysis 22(3): 398-412

Pérez, Efrén O. 2010. “Explicit Evidence on the Import of Implicit Attitudes: The IAT and Immigration Policy Judgments.” Political Behavior 32(4): 517-545