I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Comparative in Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath. Before joining Bath, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Leuven and the University of Pennsylvania. I also held visiting positions at the European University Institute, the Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, and Yale University. I was awarded my PhD in Political Science by ETH Zurich in 2017.

My research interests include political conflict and democratic innovations. More specifically, in one stream of my research, I examine the causes and consequences of ethnic mobilization, civil war, and terrorism. The project that is currently keeping me most busy is my ESRC New Investigator project, in which I research the role restrictions of ethnic rights – a form of nonviolent repression – in the escalation of self-determination conflicts from nonviolent claims to separatist war. To this end, a team of research assistants and myself are collecting new global data on government responses to self-determination claims. To establish causal evidence on the consequences of restrictions of ethnic rights, I will also conduct survey experiments. In another ongoing project, I am investigating the effects of Islamist terrorist attacks on political attitudes.

My second stream of research is focused on the potential of democratic innovations, such as deliberative mini-publics, internet voting, or voting advice applications (VAAs), to strengthen democratic quality and democratic stability. For example, in ongoing research, I investigate the potential of deliberative mini-publics to strengthen perceptions of democratic legitimacy. In other work, I investigated the potential of internet voting and VAAs to increase electoral turnout (e.g., 1 and 2), to reduce accidental voting errors, and to improve democratic representation. I am involved in a consortium of researchers which produces state-of-the-art voting advice applications (VAAs) for elections in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Our tools have been accessed by hundreds of thousands of voters across Europe.

My work has been published in academic journals including International Organization, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Communication, Government Information Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Electoral Studies, among other outlets. As part of my research, I have collected new data on self-determination movements (with Nicholas Sambanis and Andreas Schädel), sovereignty referendums (with Fernando Mendez and Nicolas Aubert), and on autonomy losses by ethnic groups (with Nicholas Sambanis). You can download these datasets here.