Published work

Empowering women or increasing response bias? Experimental evidence from Congo.” 2023. Journal of Development Economics. With Peter van der Windt.

“Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses.” 2023. Scientific Reports. With multiple co-authors.

Does Decentralization Encourage Pro-Poor Targeting? Evidence from Kenya’s Constituencies Development Fund.” 2022. World Development. With Daniel N. Posner.

Diversity and Liberalisation Reforms: Evidence from the University of Nairobi.” 2022. International Journal of Educational Development. With Rebecca Simson.

Ethnic Bias in Judicial Decision-making: Evidence from the Kenyan Criminal Appeals.” 2022. American Political Science Review. With Donghyun Danny Choi and Fiona Shen-Bayh.

  • Awarded the 2020 Fiona McGillivray Award for the Best Political Economy Paper presented at APSA 2019.

“Hidden in Plain Sight? Detecting Electoral Irregularities Using Statutory Results.” 2021. Electoral Studies. With Zach Warner, Michelle Brown, and Christian Arnold.

“Election Administration, Resource Allocation, and Turnout: Evidence from Kenya.” 2021. Comparative Political Studies.

"Electoral Administration in Fledgling Democracies: Experimental Evidence from Kenya." 2021. The Journal of Politics. With Catherine Kamindo and Peter van der Windt. Pre-Analysis Plan. Replication Data.

Security in the Absence of a State: Traditional Authority, Livestock Trading, and Maritime Piracy in Northern Somalia.” 2020. Journal of Theoretical Politics. With Robin Harding and Avidit Acharya. 

  • Awarded the 2022 Elinor Ostrom Award for the Best Article published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics awarded by the Formal Theory Section of APSA.

“(Under What Conditions) Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from Kenya’s Constituencies Development Fund.” 2019. American Political Science Review. With Daniel N. Posner.

"What's in a Name? A Method for Extracting Information about Ethnicity from Names." Political Analysis. 2015. [pdf] [code]

  • Included in a Political Analysis Virtual Issue entitled “Recent Innovations in Text Analysis for Social Science” in April 2016, featuring recent publications that “broadened the scope of text methods in political science and expanded their accessibility across subfields of political science.”

Working Papers

“Do Voters’ Election Day Experiences Matter for Electoral Integrity? Evidence from Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and the United States.” Under review. With Fanisi Mbozi (NYUAD).

“Perception, Performance, and Detectability of Conversational Artificial Intelligence Across 32 University Courses.” Under review. With Hazem Ibrahim, Fengyuan Liu, Rohail Asim, and 38 other co-authors.

“Does Election Quality Matter? A Quasi-Experiment from Kenya’s 2022 General Election.” Working Paper with Abel Oyuke (Afrobarometer) and Winnie Mitullah (U. Nairobi).

“Can Fiction Make the Climate Crisis Real? Survey Evidence from Five Countries.” Design available; data collected. With Melina Platas (NYUAD).

“A Booth of One’s Own: Gender, Election Administration, and Political Participation in Pakistan.” With Rabia Malik. Design Available.

“Does Improving Electoral Access Facilitate Clientelism? A Reassessment of Theory and Evidence.” With Daniel De Kadt.

“Top Down, Bottom Up, or Both? Community and Government Participation in Public Services.” With Ann Laudati, Eric Mvukiyehe, and Peter van der Windt.

Work in Progress

Electoral Access as Distributive Politics. Book project with Daniel de Kadt (LSE). Proposal available.

“Displacement and Disenfranchisement: Conjoint Evidence from the DRC.” Data collected. With Peter van der Windt (NYUAD) and Nik Stoop (U. Antwerp).

“Timing is Everything: Measuring the Quality of Election Day Processes with Time Stamp Data.” Data collected. With Michelle Brown.

Shelved projects

"Judicial Decisions as Public Goods: Interventions for Improving the Quality and Efficiency of Legal Judgments in Kenya." Design. Funded by EDI/UKAID. Implementation ended prematurely due to Covid-19 in July 2020.

“The Effects of Violence on Ethnic Demography and Voting: Evidence from Kenya, 2007-2017.”