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Professor of Political Science, Penn State

I teach in the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and currently serve as the co-Director of the Global and International Studies (GLIS) program. I previously held the Jeffrey L. and Sharon D. Hyde Early Career Professorship. I completed my Ph.D. at UCLA . Prior to arriving at Penn State, I was a post-doctoral research associate at Princeton University and a visiting faculty fellow at the University of Notre Dame. In 2016 I was on leave in Cape Town as a visiting scholar at Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA).

My first book (with Abel Escriba-Folch), Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival (Oxford University Press, 2015) examines how foreign policy tools destabilize dictatorships. This book won the 2017 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. A second book, with Barbara Geddes and Erica Frantz, is How Dictatorships Work (Cambridge University Press, 2018). A third book, Migration and Democracy: How Remittances Undermine Dictatorships (co-authored with Abel Escriba-Folch and Covadonga Meseguer), will be published by Princeton University Press. A current book project is Personalist Parties and the Death of Democracy. Recent research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Foreign Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Politics. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Minerva Research Initiative.

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Political Science, Penn State
  • University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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