My research focuses primarily on international security issues, including proxy wars, how democracies conduct foreign policy, and war termination. My dissertation examines proxy wars—and, in particular, how states exercise control and influence over nonstate actors in overseas conflicts. I assess the strategies that states use to select and incentivize proxies to do their bidding and how the choice of those strategies is shaped and constrained by domestic politics and legal oversight within the sponsor states. My dissertation seeks to shed light on how states try to control and supervise the actions of local proxy forces to prevent escalation or other undesired political outcomes, on the one hand, while trying to maintain secrecy and plausible deniability, on the other.

Publications

Policy or Partisanship in the United Kingdom? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit. (With Bryan Schonfeld). The Journal of Politics, Volume 83, Number 4, October 2021.

Are voters motivated by policy preferences or partisan identities? In this paper, we argue that the British Conservative Party's sudden change in Brexit policy (following the surprising result of the 2016 referendum on EU membership) offers a unique opportunity to study partisanship in the context of a natural experiment. Using an interrupted time series design, we find evidence that voters primarily care about policy: Europhilic Conservatives disaffiliated from the party, while Euroskeptics became more likely to identify with the Conservatives. These findings suggest that voters are sufficiently policy-motivated to change parties if they disagree with their party on important issues. But we find that partisan identities do play a role in the development of voter preferences in another issue area: voters who joined the Conservatives immediately after the referendum subsequently adopted more right-wing views on economic redistribution.

Coverage: Marginal Revolution, National Affairs, The Washington Post, UK in a Changing Europe, LSE British Politics and Policy

Working Papers

“Factual or Moral Persuasion in the United States? Evidence from the Papal Encyclical on Climate.” (With Bryan Schonfeld)

How do elite cues shape public opinion? We assess two ways in which such cues may be influential: by changing citizens’ factual beliefs about the world (the “factual channel”) or by triggering a moral reevaluation (the “moral channel”). We study this issue in the context of the papal encyclical on climate change, in which Pope Francis attempted to persuade Catholics that there is a scientific consensus around climate change and that protecting the environment is a moral and religious obligation. Exploiting panel data from the United States before and after the encyclical, we find that both mechanisms played a role: Catholics who regularly attended church became disproportionately more likely to believe both that global warming was happening and that climate change was a religious issue. The pope's influence on Catholic policy preferences, however, operated only through the factual channel.

Coverage: America Magazine’s “Inside the Vatican” podcast