I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. My research examines how citizens make democracy work in the developing world: whether they reward or punish incumbents at the polls, what they demand of states and markets, when they take to the streets, and, in my current work, whether they remain committed to democracy itself. Focusing on Latin America, I combine causal inference techniques, such as natural and survey experiments, with contextual knowledge drawn from extensive fieldwork. The American Political Science Association awarded me the 2026 Robert A. Dahl Award for scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.

My 2025 book, Incumbency Bias (Cambridge University Press. Studies in Comparative Politics), is the first book-length comparative investigation of why citizens systematically reward incumbents in some democracies and punish them in others. The book argues that whether office is a blessing or a curse hinges on how institutions shape the alignment between citizens' performance expectations and incumbents' capacity to deliver. It draws on fifteen months of fieldwork in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, natural experiments leveraging fine-grained administrative data, and three original survey experiments. It also received the Latin American Studies Association’s Best Book Award in Subnational Politics and an Honorable Mention in Economics and Politics.

My current research examines the demand side of the contemporary crisis of democracy. With Scott Mainwaring, I am writing a book on when citizens in post-authoritarian societies commit to democracy. Against the view that citizens trade democratic loyalty for material performance, we argue that durable commitment is rooted in concerns over rights: where democracy visibly outperforms the autocratic past in protecting civil liberties, citizens develop commitments that survive even severe economic crisis. A first article is forthcoming at Comparative Politics, and a second, After Autocracy: Civil Liberties, Collective Memory, and Democratic Commitment, provides the comparative test with panel surveys and randomized experiments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. The book manuscript extends the test to fifteen countries of LAPOP’s AmericasBarometer.

I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. I am also a board member of the Argentine Panel Election Study and a research associate of the Center on the Politics of Development at UC Berkeley.