I am a mixed method user experience researcher and political scientist with experience working on topics ranging from equity, content problems (e.g., hate speech), local governance and political behavior, and the political economy of development.
From 2019 through 2022, I conducted user research at Meta (formerly Facebook) on social media integrity problems to inform company content moderation policies, product changes, and design strategies on the Civic and Central Integrity Teams. This work employed qualitative interviews, fieldwork, surveys and survey experiments, and content analysis.
Before joining Facebook, I was a Visiting Professor of Comparative Politics at Pitzer College and Swarthmore College where I wrote and taught in the areas of local democracy, elections in developing countries, state capacity, and development policy.
My academic work focuses on the micro-foundations of clientelism, local political behavior and governance, and distributive politics at the level of rural local governments in India.
Completed work includes a series of articles that draw on behavioral and experimental measures from cross-referenced elite and voter surveys where I measure the extent to which local leaders can effectively monitor voters’ political preferences and votes, local politicians’ preferences over the beneficiaries of targeted benefits, and the effect of co-partisanship on the allocation of private anti-poverty benefits and local public goods–and its implications for strategic voting. Each of these articles develops a novel survey design for capturing local dynamics observed in fieldwork. Ongoing work examines variation in social preferences toward pro-poor distribution across localities in India.
My research has been published in Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Perspectives in Politics, and has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, American Political Science Association, and Pitzer College.