Does Local Exposure to Refugees Affect Voting Behavior
(co-authored with Jeremy Ferwerda)
The Co-opted State: Bureaucrats, Development, and Corruption in Ghana
Investing in state capacity presents a dilemma to politicians in developing democracies. While increased capacity can facilitate social and economic advancement, steps that enhance state capacity often result in decreased bureaucratic loyalty. Decreased loyalty can constrain politicians’ ability to use the state to satisfy their personal and political goals. Faced with the above dilemma, I argue that politicians engage in a mixed strategy in which they invest in bureaucratic capacity while retaining tools to enforce (individual) bureaucratic loyalty when needed.
The Political Consequences of the Mental Load
How do levels of cognitive household labor -- the ``mental load'' involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs -- affect political engagement? The mental load is distinct from the physical tasks of e.g., cooking and cleaning, and thought to be disproportionately undertaken by women. Thus far, the few studies addressing the issue have used qualitative methods to document it, and the topic has yet to be studied in political science research. As a result, we may be underestimating household gender gaps and their impact on politics.
Benito Juarez, Republican Internationalism, and the Transformation of Nineteenth Century International Order
istorical IR scholarship increasingly treats the second half of the nineteenth century as a time of transformation. Growing “interaction capacity” spurred new patterns of international organization and international law amidst inter-imperial cooperation and competition. Though it has received little attention in Historical IR, Mexico was at the centre of these occurrences – not only as a victim of imperial aggression but an active proponent of alternative visions of liberal and republican international order. From 1859 to 1867, the country saw a major debt crisis and a related intervention.
Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding
The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the U.S. has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of democratic performance from 2000 to 2018, we develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index.