Welcome!
I am Professor of Politics specializing in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. I also serve as the Director of the University of Virginia’s Quantitative Collaborative, a center designed to disseminate new advances in the quantitative social sciences and foster greater interdisciplinary collaboration. In addition, I recently served as Co-Director of the CLEAR lab, the University’s Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law (2018-2022). My scholarly expertise is on corruption, clientelism, and democratic institutional design. To put it bluntly, I study democratic failures: how democracies fail, why they fail, and what can be done to shore them up. Over the years, I have analyzed these questions in myriad ways in a variety of different countries using a wide range of research tools. My publications on democratic failure examine topics ranging from the influence of corruption on social protest, the impact of electoral rules on corrupt political financing, the manner in which authoritarian legacies create incentives for corruption in new democracies, the organization of clientelism and vote brokerage networks, the historical impact of the secret ballot on electoral coercion and political participation, the degree to which information about corruption may propagate corrupt behavior, and the relationship between police malfeasance and crime non-reporting by citizens. I have studied these issues primarily in Latin America, but have also expanded my horizons to Europe and the United States in more recent work.
On this site you will find my CV, descriptions of my book (Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team), descriptions of my articles, as well as my working papers.
I am Professor of Politics specializing in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. I also serve as the Director of the University of Virginia’s Quantitative Collaborative, a center designed to disseminate new advances in the quantitative social sciences and foster greater interdisciplinary collaboration. In addition, I recently served as Co-Director of the CLEAR lab, the University’s Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law (2018-2022). My scholarly expertise is on corruption, clientelism, and democratic institutional design. To put it bluntly, I study democratic failures: how democracies fail, why they fail, and what can be done to shore them up. Over the years, I have analyzed these questions in myriad ways in a variety of different countries using a wide range of research tools. My publications on democratic failure examine topics ranging from the influence of corruption on social protest, the impact of electoral rules on corrupt political financing, the manner in which authoritarian legacies create incentives for corruption in new democracies, the organization of clientelism and vote brokerage networks, the historical impact of the secret ballot on electoral coercion and political participation, the degree to which information about corruption may propagate corrupt behavior, and the relationship between police malfeasance and crime non-reporting by citizens. I have studied these issues primarily in Latin America, but have also expanded my horizons to Europe and the United States in more recent work.
On this site you will find my CV, descriptions of my book (Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team), descriptions of my articles, as well as my working papers.
