Much of Zechmeister's research focuses on voting behavior in Latin America, the emergence of political parties, and the volatility of party systems in the region. On these topics, she co-authored the book Latin American Party Systems. With Ryan Carlin and Matthew Singer, she also co-edited The Latin American Voter: Pursuing Representation and Accountability in Challenging Contexts, which examines similar themes of political behavior and electoral volatility in Latin America. Zechmeister's early work questions how voters in new Latin American democracies understood ideological labels, for example in her dissertation “Sheep or Shepherds? Voter Behavior in New Democratic Contexts”. She finds that meanings of "left” and “right” over the initial years of Mexican democracy contained references to valence issues and political actors that varied by individuals’ partisanships and political sophistication. “Left” labels grew ever more associated with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática and its interventionist social welfare message, while “right” labels tended to be defined by the Partido Acción Nacional and its neoliberal and socially conservative message. In related work, she demonstrates that the Partido Revoluncionario Institucional’s decades-long hegemony made location for other parties in the left-right ideological space challenging. A second study in this vein "What's Left and Who's Right?" compared the usage of ideological labels in Mexico and Argentina. This study largely confirmed her previous findings from Mexico in the Argentine case, and making the point that left-right label meanings vary by context depending on how elites discourse colors such labels. Subsequent solo scholarship and co-authored work with Margarita Corral developed these themes more deeply with the use of region-wide survey data. The most novel methodological contribution across many of these works is that they employ Q methodology, an inductive approach to the study of human subjectivity developed in cognitive psychology, her work being one of the few applications of Q methodology in Political Science. In recent years, Zechmeister has examined public opinion in the wake of natural disasters. Building off surveys conducted following the Chilean and Haitian earthquakes in 2010, Zechmeister explores in a set of papers the effect material damage and loss has on democratic attitudes and interpersonal trust. In a paper coauthored with Ryan Carlin and Gregory Love, she shows disaster victims in Chile often become less tolerant and supportive of democracy while also becoming more civically engaged. In a second paper with Carlin and Love, Zechmeister finds that, contrary to much of the existing scholarship, disaster loss can reduce social capital, but only in low state-capacity environments. Zechmeister has also contributed to terrorism studies. In her book Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public, co-authored with Jennifer Merolla, she examines how threats of terrorism affect public opinion. Using survey data from the United States and Mexico, Zechmeister and Merolla argue that terrorist threat leads to increased citizen support for domestic political leaders, making them appear more charismatic than they otherwise would, and leads to increased public support for restrictive domestic laws.
