“Unity Through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior” Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming)
Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through Particularism sheds light on these questions and more by explaining how parties can use personal vote-seeking incentives in order to decrease intra-party dissent. Studying a unique electoral reform in Mexico, the book provides a detailed description of how institutional incentives can conflict. It draws on a variety of rich, original data sources on legislative behavior and organization in 20 Mexican states to develop a novel explanation of how electoral reforms can amplify competing institutional incentives. In settings where legislative rules and candidate selection procedures favor parties, legislators may lack the resources necessary to build voter support. If this is the case, party leaders can condition access to these resources on loyalty to the party’s political agenda.
“Public Servants, Private Fortunes: The Causes and Consequences of the Wealth of Politicians” with Marko Klasnja (Book Conference Scheduled in May 2025)
Why is the political class around the world so much wealthier than the populations they represent? Do voters prefer wealthier politicians? How do the wealthy govern, and who does it benefit?
The goal of this book is to examine the causes and consequences of politician’s wealth. How wealthy is the political elite? We provide the most comprehensive account of the wealth of the political elites around the world. Using original data from the financial disclosures by more than 23,000 national-level legislators and cabinet members in 41 countries, we find that politicians are generally much wealthier than the average household in their country, but there is a large variation in the extent of financial unrepresentativeness of political elites. Why is the political elite so wealthy? Utilizing our cross-national data, survey experiments, and case studies in diverse places worldwide, we examine four potential causes of politicians’ wealth: campaign finance pressures, structural inequality, electoral institutions and parties, and voter preferences. What are the consequences of this representational inequality? Leveraging our unique cross-national data, along with detailed case studies and natural experiments, we study the impact of politicians’ wealth on redistribution, policy outcomes, and different types of legislative performance, as well as the effect of wealth on politicians’ conservatism and the mechanisms that the wealthy use to exert their influence.
“Winning More With Less: How Parties Win More Votes Without Winning Over More Voters” (Data Collection Completed, Manuscript in Progress) with Amy Catalinac
Who benefits from geographically-targeted spending? Why some countries have dominant parties that offer policies that are unpopular with the broader electorate? How do coalition partners with ideological differences govern together effectively?
In this book project, we advance a novel theory of party competition in mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems, used in 28 countries worldwide today. In this setting, voters cast two votes. We make the case that parties can win more seats by asking their supporters to cast their second vote for an allied party and that this strategy is more likely to be successful when parties control central government resources and can promise to deliver them to supporters who comply with their instructions. To make our case, we present an in-depth look at party competition in Japan, Mexico, Italy, South Korea, and Ukraine. We assemble large-scale data on voting behavior, government spending, and other demographic and fiscal features of the municipalities in each of these countries, and combine rigorous quantitative tests of our core hypotheses with insights yielded from interviews with political elites, newspaper reports, candidate manifestos, and party documents.