Research
Research interests
Comparative political economy of advanced democracies; coalition formation and legislative bargaining; redistribution and the political economy of taxation; experimental and computational methods (survey experiments, LLM-assisted text analysis).
Working papers
Frankenstein’s Bills: The Political Utility of Disjointed Legislation
I treat disjointed legislation as a strategic tool: lawmakers bundle in secondary provisions the public is unlikely to notice. Using new measures of disjointedness for bills in France, the US, and the EU, I find that lobby spending predicts disjointedness, but only when an issue’s salience is low.
Paper (PDF) · Code · Data
Tax, What Is It Good For? Perceived Government Efficiency and Redistribution Preferences
Voters’ redistributive preferences may turn not just on fairness but on whether they think government spends competently. I use policy visibility as a proxy for perceived efficiency and exploit a regression-discontinuity around the UK Winter Fuel Payment: visible spending raises willingness to redistribute among British women, the gender asymmetry the theory predicts.
Work in progress
Dilution and Crowding: Coalition Size and the Strategic Incentives of Kingmaker Parties
More small pivotal parties should mean a more fragile government, but that intuition breaks down. In a spatial model where a kingmaker’s vote reshapes how voters place it, adding pivotal parties dilutes the electoral reward for loyalty. But defectors crowd a single electoral niche, so defection pressure first rises and then recedes. Across 468 elections, pivot-party defection climbs from 0.44 with one kingmaker to 0.73 with three and then collapses, as the model predicts.