I am an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, a former editor at the Washington Post Monkey Cage, and a Principal Investigator of the 2021 Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation. My research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, post-communism, and survey methodology.
My first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the American Political Science Association's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. I am also the recipient of the Frances Rosenbluth prize for best paper published in CPS in 2021, as well as the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation and a Best Article Award honorable mention, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section.
My articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Sociological Methods & Research, and Post-Soviet Affairs.
Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, I was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. I have also worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where I designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. I hold a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
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