I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). My research is motivated by the challenges facing contemporary democracies. In an era of democratic erosion, many citizens in both new and established democracies perceive that democracy is failing to deliver and requires reform and rejuvenation. My research advances scholarly debates about these challenges, investigates how civic engagement and political participation interact with formal institutions to impact democratic resilience, and aims to contribute ideas — rigorously tested using social scientific methods attuned to causal inference — about how to foster democratic renewal.

My research agenda spans three main areas: clientelism and distributive politics; democratic accountability, resilience, and renewal; and democracy and the judiciary. I have conducted field research in Benin, Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, and have expanded my comparative focus to include cases in the Americas, including Honduras and the United States. As a scholar of comparative politics, I emphasize the importance of deep country knowledge and field-based research. Methodologically, my work employs approaches suited to causal inference and to the study of sensitive political topics, including experiments, large-scale surveys, and in-depth qualitative interviews.

I am the author of Money for Votes: The Causes and Consequences of Electoral Clientelism in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which received the African Politics Conference Group award for best book. My research has appeared in leading journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Centre, and the EGAP Metaketa initiative.

I received my PhD from UCLA and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Prior to joining USC, I was on the faculty at George Washington University.