Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Ministries matter: technocrats and regime loyalty under autocracy Political Science Research and Methods, Forthcoming. [Abs] [Link]

   How do technocrat ministers affect governance under autocracy? Autocrats frequently appoint non-partisan actors with technical competencies to bureaucratic leadership roles. Though their competencies might predict positive performance in office, these ministers are also dependent on the regime for their position and should thus demonstrate loyalty to its interests. I test this in the context of horizontal accountability to the legislature, using data on more than 27,000 legislative requests submitted to ministries in Morocco. I use both exact matching and difference-in-differences analyses to show that technocrat ministers are more than 25 percentage points less likely to respond to legislative queries than partisan cabinet members. The results imply that outside (partisan) participation in government strengthens weak institutions of executive oversight. They also cast doubt on the presumption that technocrat participation in government is universally beneficial to governance.

2. Preferences over Foreign Migration: Testing Existing Explanations in the Gulf World Politics, 74(3):443–475. 2022. [Abs] [Link]

   Do existing theories regarding the impact of foreign migration explain preferences in non-OECD countries? The author adapts and applies explanations for opposition to migration in the Arabian Gulf, a significant region in global migration today, using a survey experiment implemented in Qatar. The results offer a rare validation of predictions from the labor market competition model, demonstrating that individual employment circumstances are important preference determinants. Additionally, while OECD citizens prefer high-skilled migrants, Qataris are indifferent about blue- versus white-collar workers. Mediation analysis suggests that this null effect is the result of competing cultural and economic concerns over the effect of differing classes of migrants on economic and social welfare. The novel context provides a critical test case of the labor market hypothesis and offers insight into how migration preferences in the Global South differ from the Western experience.

3. Greasing the Wheels: the Politics of Environmental Clearances in India with Kopas, Jacob, and Urpelainen, Johannes Studies in Comparative International Development, 57(1):113–144. 2022. [Abs] [Link]

   Does political alignment at different levels of government influence centralized bureaucratic processes? Environmental clearances are important regulatory tools that allow governments to target the distribution of public goods/bads by both controlling negative externalities and allocating rents from project developers. While commentators advocate for central authorities to control environmental licensing of major projects, in emerging markets with weak formal institutions, it is still possible for local politicians to influence this process. We use data on environmental clearances in India for thermal (primarily coal-fired) power plants between the years 2004 and 2014 to test whether local legislators influence an otherwise bureaucratic process in which they play no formal role. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that partisan alignment with the state chief minister results in a sharp increase in local clearance applications. This is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of political influence “greases the wheels” of bureaucracy by facilitating more environmental approvals, rather than creating regulatory bottlenecks. Our results contribute to a growing literature that suggests that lower-level politicians can still exert influence on the policy process despite having few institutionalized powers.

4. A Dynamic Model of Primaries with Slough, Tara, and Ting, Michael M Journal of Politics, 2020. [Abs] [PDF]

   Primary elections are increasingly popular around the world, but historically political parties have typically chosen their candidate selection mechanisms in a decentralized manner. We develop a theory that accounts for variations in the use of primary elections in these settings. In our model, two parties choose candidates for general elections over an infinite horizon. Each party has an elite and a non-elite faction, where the elite faction can choose whether to hold primaries or nominate itself. Primaries produce more electable candidates, but losing a primary also deprives elites of private goods and future elite status. The model predicts that parties adopt primaries under high ideological polarization or when they are electorally disadvantaged. Additionally, we show how rigidities in the ability of winners to change candidate selection mechanisms can increase the universal adoption of primaries in electorally volatile environments.

5. Environmental justice in India: incidence of air pollution from coal-fired power plants with Kopas, Jacob, Jin, Xiaomeng, Harish, SP, Kennedy, Ryan, Shen, Shiran Victoria, and Urpelainen, Johannes Ecological Economics, 176():106711. 2020. [Link]
6. Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War with Corstange, Daniel American Journal of Political Science, 62(2):441–455. 2018. [Abs] [PDF]

   How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one‐sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people’s understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.

Book Project

Elected institutions are increasingly a fixture of autocracies: today, roughly 85% of autocratic regimes select legislative deputies through regular national elections. Previous research has produced a number of explanations for the spread of institutional autocracy, but there is still much we do not understand about how governance works in such settings. In my primary research agenda, I examine the ways in which institutions borrowed from democracies impact the political playing field under autocracy to create opportunities for opposition actors or allow the regime to intervene in policy-making.

I show that institutional authorities create space for opposition participation in government and allow them to compete with regime parties to attract voter support. For this work, I draw on a novel dataset of more than 38,000 unique written and oral questions submitted by Moroccan MPs during the 2011-2016 parliamentary session, original survey experiments, as well as qualitative data gleaned from interviews with current and former parliamentary deputies over seven months of field work between 2015 and 2018.

Selected Working Papers (available on request)

1. Votes for Effort: Constituency Service and Opposition Support under Autocracy [Abs]

   How does the opposition in an authoritarian setting mobilize turnout when it lacks regime connections ostensibly required to deliver private goods to its supporters? The regime possesses an extensive set of strategies to incentivize electoral support for its preferred candidates, yet opposition parties often achieve significant electoral successes. I argue that institutional channels help to level the playing field between regime and opposition candidates in developing autocracies. Though regime candidates may have the ear of those in power through backdoor channels and personal connections, opposition politicians can use ‘by the book’ politics – the legitimate authorities that accompany their office – to ensure the supply of constituency goods. I draw on a vast database of activity from recent legislative terms in Morocco, including more than 38000 unique written and oral queries submitted by elected members of parliament, and identify a strong linkage between activity in office and subsequent electoral outcomes. Voters reward parties and deputies that engage in more constituency service via institutionalized action. But the relationship between activity and vote share is exclusive to opposition parties: regime-linked parties do not see electoral gains from increased legislative activity, but neither are they punished for shirking in office.

2. Legislative Cooptation in Authoritarian Regimes: Policy Cooperation in the Kuwait National Assembly with Tavana, Daniel [Abs]

   Autocrats use legislative institutions to coopt rival elites. Legislative institutions provide autocrats with an important set of tools that can be used to mitigate threats to their survival. But this finding draws attention to a new puzzle: once autocrats endow these institu- tions with law-making power, how do autocrats ensure these legislators will cooperate with their policy agenda? We develop a theory of legislative cooptation, or the intentional exchange of economic rents and policy concessions to legislators in exchange for policy cooperation. We test our theory using a novel dataset of 150,000 roll call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly that spans the entirety of Kuwait’s legislative history. We leverage the regime’s participation in the legislature to establish a measure of legislative cooperation and use this measure to estimate the efficacy of regime strategies—economic rents and policy concessions—in inducing conformity with its policy agenda. We find that though both mechanisms are effective in eliciting cooperation, they are not interchangeable and have different normative implications.

3. Political Connections, Patronage, and Consumer Attitudes: Evidence from Morocco with Bhandari, Abhit [Abs]

   Clientelism alters citizens’ behavior as voters, but can it also impact citizens as consumers? We argue that despite voting for politicians who offer targeted goods, citizens abstain from financial transactions with these politicians in the future. Clientelistic politicians, by demonstrating their willingness to bend rules in the electoral process, lead consumers to believe they will also be untrustworthy in a transactional environment. We test this theory using evidence from a conjoint experiment in Morocco, a country where politicians often have one foot in the private sector. The results demonstrate the linkages between patronage networks and consumer behavior in contexts characterized by clientelism and suggest that political support does not necessarily translate to economic support.

4. Distribution under Autocracy [Abs]

   How does the presence of an autocrat with unique authorities over the legislature affect distributional politics in what are otherwise democratic institutions? Under institutional autocracy, the autocrat exerts considerable control over government formation via manipulation of elections or executive authorities. And yet he relinquishes other powers – namely, the ability to enact laws – to elected legislatures that might include representatives from outside the regime. I consider the implications of two specific autocratic authorities: the ability to dismiss an elected legislature, necessitating new elections, and the ability to manipulate electoral results in his own favor. I construct a formal model of policy bargaining in an autocratic context, drawing on approaches used in democratic settings. I find that the ability to dismiss the legislature alone creates an incentive for other players to include the autocrat in governing coalitions, since it is only by including him that they ensure coalitional stability and retain the benefits of rule. This, in turn, creates a distributional distortion in the autocrat’s favor, as he is assured of access to proposal power. If institutions are binding, such that the autocrat’s decision to dismiss the legislature is linked to his support for policy proposals, members of the ruling coalition have an incentive to include him in their policy proposals, and the autocrat’s expected payoff is greater relative to a game in which he votes separately on policy and coalition dissolution. In both cases, payoffs are asymmetrically distributed in the autocrat’s favor relative to a democratic setting.