Current Research

1. Blaming the Refs: Strategic Responses to Critical Election Reports (with Tyler Pratt)
   Working paper
   Funding: Rapoport Summer Grant, UNC Political Science Department ($3,000)
   [Draft Paper] [Presentation] [Pre-Registration 1] [Pre-Registration 2]
   Abstract

   Governments accused of electoral misconduct often push back against the credibility of election observation missions (EOMs). When do these efforts succeed? This paper investigates the strategies governments use to contest critical EOM findings and their effectiveness in shaping perceptions of electoral integrity. We focus on two prominent contestation strategies: direct attacks on observer credibility and appeals to politically compliant “zombie” monitors that rubber-stamp elections. We test the effects of these strategies among two key audiences for EOMs: domestic citizens and foreign government elites. In a vignette experiment among Kenyan citizens, respondents evaluate a disputed Kenyan election in light of a critical EOM report and a randomly assigned government rebuttal. In a second experiment, U.S. foreign policy professionals participate in a simulated interagency deliberation over the contested Kenyan election. We find that critical EOM reports substantially reduce perceptions of election integrity among both Kenyan respondents and US policy officials. While government rebuttals fail to persuade Kenyan citizens, they increase perceived election integrity and diminish punitive responses such as aid suspension among US elites. Our findings suggest that credible monitors retain significant power to shape perceptions of election quality, but that this influence is vulnerable to government contestation among foreign elites.

2. Credit Among Regimes: Political Affinity in Sovereign Bilateral Lending
   Working paper
   Abstract

   Why do some sovereign creditors extend more credit to certain borrowers than others? I argue that political regime type is a key determinant of official bilateral lending. Autocratic governments face stronger incentives to borrow externally, driven by high exit costs from office and weak institutional constraints on fiscal policy, yet confront a restricted supply of credit from democracies. Democratic creditors discount autocratic borrowers both on institutional grounds and because of potential domestic political backlash from extending public resources to authoritarian regimes. These supply-side constraints position fellow autocracies as lenders of last resort. I hypothesize that autocracy–autocracy dyads exhibit higher bilateral debt stocks than other regime-type pairings, and that this pattern intensifies during borrower-side crises and periods of tightened global financial liquidity. Using dyadic data from the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics (1980–2023) and the V-Dem Regimes of the World classification, I estimate Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood gravity models with debtor, creditor, and year fixed effects. The results support my hypotheses. Furthermore, the autocratic regime affinity effect strengthens when China is excluded, indicating that Chinese lending is broad rather than regime-selective. However, the effect attenuates when debt is normalized by borrower GDP, suggesting that autocratic creditors lend strategically rather than unconditionally. These findings illuminate an underexplored political dimension of sovereign finance with implications for understanding authoritarian resilience and democratic backsliding.

3. Free to Practice, Free from Terror: Freedom of Religion and Religious Terrorism
   Working paper
   Abstract

   What happens to religious terrorist organizations when states have widespread religious freedoms? Prior research has traced the roots of religious terrorism to relative deprivation and religious favoritism, yet the role of broad religious freedoms has received little attention. I argue that religious terrorist groups decline when countries have religious freedoms. Guaranteeing such rights, I contend, equip states to resist religious terrorism through two mechanisms: they defuse grievance-driven mobilization, and they constrain dominant religious groups from repressing minorities. Drawing on a variety of different data sources and different estimation strategies, I assess how religious freedoms shape the presence religious terrorist groups. The findings indicate that states with widespread religious freedoms host fewer religious terrorist organizations, and that such groups, where present, conduct less domestic terrorist attacks. This study’s findings contribute to the literature by framing religious freedoms as a stabilizing institutional arrangement, enabling states to have a comparative advantage against religious terrorist organizations.