I am an Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. I study authoritarianism and democracy, focusing on how political regimes emerge, survive, and break down.

My current book project, Pathways to Dictatorship, develops a new framework for understanding authoritarian regimes based on how they come to power. I also study how we conceptualize and measure changes in democracy. My article “Measuring Democratic Backsliding,” challenges prevailing accounts of global democratic decline and was the centerpiece of a PS: Political Science & Politics special issue.

My first book, Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines how dictators share power with political elites. It received the APSA William H. Riker Book Prize and was named one of Foreign Affairs’ best books of 2021. My research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, and other top journals.


Contact:
[email protected]
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Office: S284 Gibson Hall
University of Virginia
Department of Politics
1540 Jefferson Park Ave
Charlottesville, VA 22903