Research Statement — Victor Thompson
In collaboration with Lawrence Bobo
This research begins from the premise that crime and punishment are not merely legal or behavioral phenomena but are deeply racialized and rooted in social interactions influenced by group identities. I am primarily interested in how people interpret lawbreaking and systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system through the lens of group position theory. My work suggests that Americans’ “lay accounts” of crime vary by race and ideology and demonstrates how punitive attitudes are tied to perceived threats to status and belonging.
Rather than treating punishment as an objective state function in response to ethical or moral transgressions, this work situates it within the historical and cultural context of racial inequality and the maintenance of a racialized hierarchy.
A slightly different body of work focuses on the institutions that classify and enumerate populations. My dissertation used response variability on census questions to theorize how multiracial identities are informed by racial descent rules.
A much larger project continues my interest in group identities on the census by examining global enumeration practices. This is a collaborative project with Tahu Kukutai at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Driven by an interest in governments’ practices of enumerating populations by racial and ethnic characteristics, we explore why some states adopt racial and ethnic enumeration practices—including indigeneity, ethnic-national, and other group-based identities—while others do not. We continue to collect, interpret, and code enumeration forms and population registers from every nation during the last five census rounds (1975–2024). The project’s archive of census forms and documents (eCounts) is organized by census round and region, and you can compare coverage across countries in the census rounds matrix. A website to house the broader project is being updated at www.drvthompson.com.
This research highlights the role of state enumeration practices, as well as the growing reliance on backchannels such as population registers and linked administrative databases, in structuring inequality and shaping the narratives through which demographic change is interpreted and groups access power. At present, we are updating the most recent round of enumeration and are moving toward finalizing our project.
More recently, I have begun exploring the role of racialized grievance in political violence. In a recent paper, I use the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset to show how group-based grievance functions as a pathway into violent extremism, particularly for far-right individuals in the Trump era.
My research emphasizes that grievance for the far right is not rooted in deprivation or a lack of access to power, but in the perceived erosion of group-based status within a racialized social order. This work seeks to build a model of political violence that links structural change, a sense of belonging to a group under status threat, emotional attachments to perceived status loss, and political opportunity structures to the mobilization of violence.
Across these areas, my work is unified by a central concern: how racial hierarchies are maintained, challenged, and mobilized through state institutions and the meanings attached to social interactions. I am adept at using large-scale census data, survey data, international data, and individual-level datasets to address my research questions, and I am skilled in quantitative methods and research design.
My broader goal is to clarify how race operates simultaneously as a system of stratification, a source of identity, and a catalyst for collective action and conflict. Data-driven community work, such as the Pacoima project (maps and historical data), applies the same tools to understand how racial and economic change plays out at the neighborhood level.