University of Kansas assistant professor of political science Patrick Miller specializes in political behavior including political psychology, elections and polling. He is pictured on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016 on the KU campus.

When East Coast native Patrick Miller moved to Kansas, he figured it would not be a dull place to watch politics.

As Miller’s work as a political scientist — specializing in American political behavior, psychology, partisanship and surveys — has supported, there’s a lot more going on in places like Kansas than outsiders may see on the surface.

“I’ve always kind of watched Kansas politics because it’s entertaining, and it’s different,” Miller said, comparing the conservative-leaning state to more liberal Massachusetts in that both consistently vote one way, but their majorities are divided between more and less staunch members. “We think of them as one-party states, but they’re actually more diverse than we realize.”

Miller, 36, is an assistant professor of political science in his fourth year at KU.

His field of study sheds light on how voter behavior has led to our current political climate, as well as where it might be heading next.

Basically, he’s concluded so far that we’re uncivil, we’re polarized and we’re getting worse.

“If you use surveys and you use experiments to understand how average people think about politics, and how they react to politics, you learn that a lot of the conventional wisdom we grew up with about politics is wrong,” he said.

Things are actually much more complex, he said. “Partisanship is a very powerful thing, but there’s a lot more to politics than if you’re a Democrat or Republican.”

Miller and co-researchers conducted similar surveys of 1,200 random Americans in 2010, 2012 and 2016. He said both parties’ negative views of the other by no means originated during this year’s presidential election.

“They were already bad to begin with,” he said.

“They get a little worse.”

Again, that “conventional wisdom” we think we know — even about ourselves — turns out not always to be true, according to data.

A few examples, according to Miller:

When it comes to the role of emotion in political engagement, people generally think fearmongering campaigns and advertisements are bad, because they prey on uninformed voters.

Actually, data show that the people most likely to have an emotional reaction to fearmongering are the most knowledgeable voters, the types who vote in primaries.

When it comes to political civility, “we found that people are very hypocritical,” Miller said. “On the one hand they say they like civility in politics, but on the other hand they are completely uncivil.”

Same with open-mindedness toward the other party.

People who said in surveys that they were open-minded still formed opinions based on their own party’s cue, Miller said. How open-minded they professed to be had no effect on how they reacted to messages from the other side.

“Democrats and Republicans really hate each other, and they have no problem admitting that,” Miller said. “That really is what we act on.”

In surveys, the majority of Republicans agreed that Democrats were “stupid, un-American and socialist,” Miller said, while the majority of Democrats agreed that Republicans were “stupid, racist and sexist.” He said fewer than 15 percent of people from either party agreed to any positive statement about the other party, such as, say, “Republicans are hard-working” or “Democrats are nice people.”

“We’re in a very polarized political era right now,” Miller said.

Miller said voters are increasingly “filtering people out of their lives” who don’t align with their political views, and increasingly consuming partisan media — such as Fox News for Republicans and MSNBC for Democrats.

“We are increasingly living in partisan and ideological bubbles,” he said. “That doesn’t challenge our points of view. The danger with that … Democrats and Republicans are both living in two separate realities about perceptions of fact.”

Instead of moderates, most members of Congress are at the more “extreme” ends of their political parties’ views, Miller said.

That’s being perpetuated by voters, in part because primary voters — the ones who tend to be more informed, more active and also more ideologically extreme — are deciding who’s ultimately on the general election ticket, he said. To those voters, candidates who’ve compromised are often seen as weak on their respective agendas.

That’s unhealthy, Miller said, because the founders set up checks and balances and wanted us to find common ground.

“I genuinely think that the mentality of uncompromising partisanship and loyalty to our parties is the biggest threat to our democracy today,” he said, “because nothing gets done.”

A native of Virginia Beach, Va., Miller got his bachelor’s degree in political science and sociology from the College of William and Mary but wasn’t able to immediately parlay that into a job in Washington, D.C., as hoped.

He said the one job offer he did get at the time was from Teach For America, which led him to Atlanta, where he spent two years teaching a 100 percent special education fifth-grade class at an inner-city school.

That work was definitely not for him, Miller said. He decided to return to school to pursue an advanced degree in the area of political science that first piqued his interest during his undergraduate studies. He then completed a joint master’s and doctoral program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a postdoctoral at Duke University. After two years as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, Miller came to Kansas.

Miller has regularly been called upon by Kansas media to comment on the current election cycle.

He said he keeps up with research in his field, then mulls what the political science and data can tell us about what’s happening right now — which he monitors daily, mainly through national and regional newspapers and polling groups.

Miller won’t publicly say who he’s voting for in this year’s presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. But he did say he’s not excited about either one.

Personally, Miller said, “I would call myself an angry moderate who dislikes both parties.”

Professionally, Miller described himself as a neutral observer. And so far, he said, as a researcher and academic, Kansas has been a pretty good place from which to watch politics.