Hello! I am an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Central European University in Budapest with the AUTHLIB project. I completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

My research interests include political economy, comparative democracy & autocracy, political parties, and data science methods. My current project examines the incentives that shape coalition building in backsliding democracies. 

I scrape social media data to get leverage on the attitudes, networks, and behavior of political elites, which is especially useful in hard-to-observe settings such as authoritarian countries. I develop text-as-data methods to place leaders and party members on various scales, including illiberalism, authoritarianism, and left-right economic positions. I also draw on surveys, economic data, and fieldwork.

I find that authoritarian populists follow as much as lead. Political elites responsible for dismantling democratic institutions are often responding to the preferences of economic elites and a few select social groups based on shared identity. My work has been published in Party Politics, South European Society and Politics, Politics and Governance, and Nationalities Papers, as well as public-facing outlets including The Democracy Paradox and Foreign Policy in Focus.

I also study Middle East politics, broadly. I have spent years living, studying, and researching in the region, including in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. I speak Turkish at home and am advanced in Arabic.