Large-scale disruptions to everyday infrastructure are becoming more frequent due to climate change, population growth, and increased user demand. While the political consequences of gradual changes in public service quality are relatively well understood, we know less about the electoral consequences of public service breakdowns where these services were once reliable and readily accessible. To address this critical question, I use the quasi-random allocation of electric outages in South Africa to examine how the breakdown of public services influences voting behavior.

This talk examines how illicit flows that cross borderlands shape security from the local to the global level. It introduces the concept of Global Illicit Supply Chain Networks to explain how trafficking hubs—places where several illicit flows intersect, often near borders—connect regions of conflict and instability with wider global systems. These hubs are not peripheral; they are crucial nodes where local arrangements, often between state and non-state actors, sustain both order and disorder.

Does public sector employment make graduates less likely to join anti-regime protests? Recent scholarship argues yes, with implications for bottom-up democratization in late-developing economies with expansive public and higher education sectors. This paper examines how that thesis travels to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region marked by segmented labor markets, developed tertiary education, and persistent authoritarianism.

Who pays for postwar demobilization? I argue that postwar governments use gender-based labor discrimination to facilitate veteran reintegration, pushing women out of jobs they gained during wartime. While veteran grievances are theorized to reduce class inequality through welfare expansion, I demonstrate an alternative mechanism: gender-based labor discrimination that undermines women’s labor market position. During war, women often benefit from the absence of male labor, gaining expertise in traditionally male sectors.

This paper advances a “relational geopolitics” account of the European Union’s foreign policy, arguing that the EU exercises power through standards, markets, conditional finance, citizen-centered and institutional ties – not through classic state coercion (Anghel, 2025). Empirically, it anchors the argument in evidence on rising global risks to EU security, first mapped through expert reviews and now tested with embedded expert-survey experiments (Global Risks to the EU Project, 2025). The risk landscape is concrete – from a potential U.S.

Democratic backsliding occurs incrementally, but the empirical study of how citizens respond to undemocratic politicians has been predominantly static. I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability.

(with Bryce Dietrich)

Why do some ethnic groups produce local political leaders while others do not? We argue that the spatial distribution of ethnic groups within cities -- particularly their concentration into ethnic enclaves -- shapes political candidate emergence. Ethnic enclaves facilitate leadership by reducing mobilization costs, enabling targeted public goods provision, and fostering dense social and economic networks. Using a novel approach that combines machine learning classification of candidates' ethnic ancestries with spatial measures of ethnic clustering, we analyze data from 638 U.S.

Why do some individuals choose to betray their country, engage in espionage, or commit acts of terrorism? From Kim Philby to Edward Snowden and from agencies to academia, history is full of figures who have willfully jeopardized national security. What compels people to “cross the line”—and can such dangers be detected in time? In Treason, Terrorism, and Betrayal: Why Individuals Cross the Line, William Costanza employs an interdisciplinary lens to explore the psychological, ideological, and situational factors behind acts of betrayal.