RESEARCH
JOB MARKET PAPER
Legislative Performance and Presidential Elections
Abstract: Does co-partisanship between legislative and presidential candidates impact presidential elections? This study explores the relationship between the performance of local legislators and voters' choices for the presidential candidate in Africa. While retrospective voting has been extensively studied in elections across the continent, the focus has primarily been on national-level performance, with local performance often overlooked. However, given the limited capacity of the state to provide public goods at the national level, local governments play a crucial role in filling this gap and delivering essential services that directly impact voters' daily lives. Drawing on data from the Afrobarometer survey Round 7 conducted in Ghana, the findings indicate that when legislative candidates perform well, voters are more likely to favor a presidential candidate from the same political party. This finding suggests that voters prioritize the immediate impact of their representatives' performance on their own communities over broader national policies that may have limited direct effects on their daily lives. Overall, this study emphasizes the significance of local-level performance and accountability in shaping voting behavior and democratic outcomes in African countries.
SELECTED PUBLISHED PAPERS
Constructing Generalizable Geographic Natural Experiments - with Giancarlo Visconti and Kayla Young [Research and Politics Journal ]
Abstract: A natural experiment is a real-world situation that generates as-if random or haphazard assignment to treatment. Geographic or administrative boundaries can be exploited as natural experiments to construct treated and control groups. Previous research has demonstrated that matching can help enhance these designs by reducing imbalances on observed covariates. An important limitation of this empirical approach, however, is that the results are inherently local. While the treated and control groups may be quite similar to each other, they could be substantially different from the target population of interest (e.g., a country). We propose a simple design inspired by the idea of template matching to construct generalizable geographic natural experiments. By matching our treated and control groups to a template (i.e., the target population), we obtain groups that are similar to the target population of interest and to each other, which can increase both the internal and external validity of the study.
Undergraduates and Political Science Research: Insights from Research Assistants in a Minority-Serving Institution Lab - with Zabdi Velasquez, Jasmine Esmail...& Kim Yi Dionne[Political Science and Politics ]
Abstract: This study examines undergraduate research experiences at a minority-serving institution (MSI) in a political science laboratory. Students contributed to projects in a collaborative research lab at the University of California Riverside that involves undergraduate and graduate students in projects related to health and politics. Adopting a participatory approach to research, the study’s research participants also are coauthors who co-created the research protocols; collected the data; transcribed, coded, and analyzed the data; and wrote up the findings. Our analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with current and former undergraduate research assistants (RAs) found that their work in the lab challenged their perceptions of what research is and what it means to do research; shaped their path to pursue graduate studies; developed their social and professional skills; and offered an inclusive and humanizing experience with graduate students and faculty members. Challenges that the RAs mentioned included time management, bureaucratic accounting and payroll procedures, and feelings of self-doubt; the lab’s culture of inclusion and independence mitigated some of these challenges. Our findings align with the scholarly literature that suggests collaborative research opportunities can have beneficial outcomes, particularly for students from groups that are underrepresented in doctoral programs.