About

I am an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia and a 2024 (Non-Resident) Fellow at the Gothenburg Governance and Local Development Institute. I specialize in comparative politics and political economy with an emphasis on India. The substantive questions that drive my research have to do with the politics of public service provision, distributive politics, gender disparities and multi-level governance.

Research topics

• Political science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Political economy
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Replication Data for: Getting on the Grid: A Field Experiment on Bottom-Up Political Pressure and Access to Essential Public Services

  Open MIND · 2026-02-09

  dataset1st authorCorresponding

  Water is essential for human life, yet governments frequently leave vulnerable citizens to rely on informal channels for access. What can motivate governments to provide public services such as water to citizens trapped in informality? We theorize how accessing state services involves distinct strategic interactions between citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians at different formalization stages. A large factorial field experiment in Mumbai's informal settlements reveals that a bureaucratic facilitation drive significantly improved citizens' ability to access municipal water connections in policy-eligible settlements, but only when combined with a bottom-up political coordination campaign targeting elected officials. While bureaucratic assistance helped citizens through the petitioning stage of the formalization process, political pressure was needed to ensure service delivery in the infrastructural stage more open to political influence. Our findings illuminate how specific citizen empowerment campaigns reshape the incentives of otherwise reluctant bureaucrats and politicians to provide marginalized groups their basic human rights.

  DOI

• Replication Data for: "Getting on the Grid: A Field Experiment on Bottom-Up Political Pressure and Access to Essential Public Services"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2025-07-09

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Replication data for "Getting on the Grid: A Field Experiment on Bottom-Up Political Pressure and Access to Essential Public Services".

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnonationalist Gender Norms: How Parties Shape Voter Attitudes toward Female Candidates in India

  American Journal of Political Science · 2023-04-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract How do parties in multiethnic societies shape voter attitudes toward female candidates? We address this question, focusing on parties with ideologies that contain ethnonationalist gender norms—patriarchal norms applied to women from an ethnonationalist party's core ethnic constituency. We argue that, while these norms appeal to an ethnonationalist party's base, they also provide informational cues to the party's “non‐core” voters that undermine their support for the party's “core” female candidates. Evidence from an original conjoint survey experiment in the Indian state of Bihar supports our argument; upper‐caste female candidates suffer a support penalty when they are affiliated with the national ruling party, whose ideology prescribes ethnonationalist gender norms targeting its core Hindu upper‐caste constituency. This penalty, we show, is driven by the party's non‐core voters. Our results, which we further bolster using real‐world electoral data, illuminate when and how ethnonationalist gender norms disadvantage elite female candidates.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pipe Dreams: How Bureaucratic Hurdles and Identity Politics Shape Urban Water Scarcity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Electing Women in Ethnically Divided Societies: Candidates, Campaigns, and Intersectionality in Bihar, India

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-11-04

  datasetOpen access

  Appendices, Stata Dataset, and Results Log for Electing Women in Ethnically Divided Societies: Candidates, Campaigns, and Intersectionality in Bihar, India.

  PublisherDOI

• Electing Women in Ethnically Divided Societies: Candidates, Campaigns, and Intersectionality in Bihar, India

  Comparative Political Studies · 2022-11-18 · 9 citations

  article

  What factors influence women’s political success in ethnically divided societies? Using an original survey experiment in the Indian state of Bihar, supplemented with qualitative interviews, we explore the impact of two factors—intersecting gender and caste identity, and the interaction of campaign appeal with voter experiences of caste discrimination—on women candidates’ success in state-level elections. We find, first, that women voters prefer women candidates, and that Scheduled Caste and Muslim voters also prefer candidates from their in-groups. At the same time, we identify evidence of intersectional effects, namely, that Muslim women candidates suffer from a disadvantage vis-a-vis women candidates from other backgrounds. We also show that women voters prefer candidates who offer security, especially when the candidates are women. Finally, we demonstrate that personal experience with caste discrimination increases support for women candidates. These results indicate that voters see women leaders as well-placed to ameliorate their security vulnerabilities.

  PublisherDOI

• The (Missing?) Role of Institutions in Behavioral Public Administration

  Journal of Behavioral Public Administration · 2022-04-18 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Editor’s note. In this roundtable, the contributors discuss the role of institutions (or lack thereof) in behavioral public administration (BPA). In a multidisciplinary discourse, the contributors touch on the many tensions that exist between institutional and behavioral perspectives of public administration. This roundtable is intended to spark additional discourse on the role of institutions in how they parameterize behaviors within or how individual behaviors might, in the aggregate, influence the norms and rules that shape institutions. Here at JBPA, we encourage further dialogue on the role of institutions in behavioral studies and holding work from a macro-, meso-, and micro-lens accountable to each another (Jilke et al., 2019). The editorial team at JBPA is thankful to Herbert Simon Award (Midwest Political Science Association) winners Anthony Bertelli (2020) and Norma Riccucci (2021) for organizing this thoughtful conversation. We hope that the discussion offered in this roundtable will inspire further inquiry from our readers. We encourage thought leaders in the field of public administration and beyond to continue this conversation here at JBPA. Therefore, we are announcing a Call for Papers, in response to this roundtable. Contributing papers can take one of several forms: (1) Research Letters (of no more than 2,000 words), for instance, might provide replications of existing work in BPA where the replications newly account for institutional embeddedness. (2) Perspective and Practices submissions (generally limited to 4,000 words) should be written as thoughtful responses to the discourse below, and (3) Research Articles (up to 8,000 words) can be more thoroughly threshed out theoretical conceits about institutions in BPA. William G. Resh, Editor-in-Chief

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• J. Michael Cathcart

  9 shared

• C. Spencer Nichols

  5 shared

• Sarah E. Lane

  Georgia Tech Research Institute

  5 shared

• James E. Turpen

  Georgia Tech Research Institute

  4 shared

• Brian Kocher

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  3 shared

• Naomi Diamond

  2 shared

• Edgar Z. Friedenberg

  1 shared

• Jeremy Ellis

  University of Utah

  1 shared