Welcome!

​I am the Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the International and Area Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. In the Fall of 2018, I will be a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. I received my Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University in 2017. I study public opinion and political behavior in authoritarian regimes, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. I am also interested in macro-issues of regime stability and legitimization in non-democratic and transitioning regimes. 

My current book project, ​The Autocratic Voter: Understanding Partisanship and Electoral Behavior under Authoritarianism, investigates why people choose to vote (or not) in non-competitive elections. I spent 2014/15 in Cameroon conducting an original national public opinion survey in order to explore how and why people choose to engage in elections that never result in electoral turnover. I show that there are important (yet so far unexplored) cleavages in autocratic regimes that create different incentives for different types of people to participate in politics.