Hello and welcome! I am a political scientist who studies non-democratic politics, with a particular focus on electoral manipulation in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. My geographic area of expertise is Russia and the post-communist world. I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in May 2019; I held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and am currently an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University.
I use multiple tools in my research, including statistical analysis, methods for causal inference (such as regression-discontinuity designs and pre-processing techniques), field interviews, archival study, and survey-experimental research. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, Democratization, and Government and Opposition, Europe-Asia Studies, and Russian Politics. For more information, my CV is available here.
Book project
The most common form of authoritarianism in the modern world is authoritarianism with elections. Elections in these hybrid, or electoral authoritarian, regimes have been shown to have a variety of stabilizing effects for incumbents, even as organized opposition contestation poses some risks. My research investigates how authoritarian leaders attempt to manage these risks through electoral manipulation. In particular, my dissertation addresses two interrelated questions: why are some elections manipulated more severely than others, and why do the techniques used to tamper with elections vary across space and over time?
To answer these questions, I investigate principal-agent dynamics between leaders who wish to influence the election result and the individuals who actually stuff the ballot boxes, buy the votes, or forge the results. These low-level actors who must bear the direct costs and risks of tampering with the election, while the direct benefits of manipulation accrue to the leader. I argue that this principal-agent relationship helps determine the severity and type of election manipulation that political leaders are able to generate.
In particular, I identify two factors that interact to shape the principal-agent relationship when it comes to electoral manipulation. First, the consolidation of patronage networks that link high-level political patrons with front-line agents affects agents’ incentive to engage in manipulation; agents are more likely to manipulate on behalf of a patron who controls a resource-rich, secure network of clients. Second, agents must evaluate the local risk of exposure and punishment for engaging in illegal forms of manipulation (including political and legal penalties). Features that affect these risks–including opposition party activity, civil society, and courts–I call local constraints. Where local constraints are high, agents are more willing to engage in harder-to-attribute forms of manipulation, like vote-buying or intimidation, than in tactics like falsification.
This theory has several implications for better understanding electoral manipulation. Most importantly, it suggests that an incumbent’s declining popularity alone will be insufficient to produce cleaner elections. Competitive elections can still lead to high levels of electoral manipulation if one candidate is able to maintain control over patronage resources. Manipulated elections that result in unexpectedly poor results for incumbents, which can provoke major protest, are more likely in cases where patronage networks themselves fragment and realign around competing patrons. Second, it emphasizes the importance of local opposition and civil-society activity in forcing incumbents away from cost-effective, but risky forms of manipulation like falsification, and toward costly techniques like vote-buying.
I test this theory using multiple methods. Election-forensic techniques use statistical analysis of precinct-level election results to look for non-random patterns in the data that can be indicative of manipulation. I employ multiple election-forensic tools to analyze election results in the subnational regions of Russia, Mexico, and Ukraine over time. I also conducted field interviews of election observers and administrators in Russia from September – December 2015, and conducted a survey experiment of public attitudes toward electoral manipulation in Russia in May 2016.
I am currently developing this project as a book proposal. For my other projects, please see the Research page.