Andrea Vaccaro is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Social Sciences and Economics, Sapienza University of Rome. He is a former PhD Fellow at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and a former Visiting PhD Researcher at the Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg. He is currently finalising his doctoral dissertation on the measurement of state capacity. More broadly, his research interests include the links between state, democracy, and development, measurement issues, and quantitative methods.