About Me

Welcome! I hold a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research (CIPR), Tulane University. My research lies within the field of Comparative Politics, where I focus on the dynamics of representation, political participation, and their consequences for democracy. On the political representation side, my work addresses the contemporary logic of clientelism, citizens’ disengagement with party organizations, and democratic discontent. On political participation, my research explores how to reduce turnout inequality and examines the effect of institutional arrangements—e.g., compulsory voting, fines for abstention—on class, generational, and educational biases in turnout. I also study the often-neglected form of participation known as claim-making: actions citizens undertake to obtain state responses. While scholarship on turnout and social movements is well documented, claim-making literature is an emerging field that offers a new lens to understand the political interests of citizens and mass interest groups. My work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Electoral Studies, Policy Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Política y Gobierno, and Revista de Ciencia Política, among other journals. You can see all my articles on my research page.

I use a multi-method approach to investigate these topics, employing statistical methods and experimental research designs, including survey experiments and field experiments. For theory-building purposes, I draw on qualitative field research, which includes interviews, participant observation, archival research, and shadowing strategies. Analytically, I use process tracing to generate causal explanations, identify causal mechanisms, and uncover variation in patterns of behavior.

My book project, titled Clientelism Without Party Machines: The Logic of Clientelism for Programmatic Parties, provides a framework for understanding how parties, lacking the features of party machines, can still employ clientelism as an electoral strategy by outsourcing organizational capacity and territorial control to local associations. I argue that local associations, deeply rooted in their territories and possessing vertically integrated structures, engage in clientelism when they receive resources from local public servants in exchange for providing electoral support to incumbents through campaigning, canvassing, and electoral mobilization. My framework explains how parties without strong roots in society, and facing acute representation crises, can leverage the rich topography of civil society organizations to their advantage, benefiting from their territorial control and connections with otherwise disengaged citizens. Overall, the project contributes to the literature on political representation, distributive politics, clientelism, and the engagement of civic associations in the political process.