I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. 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. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

I am a scholar of comparative politics and political behavior. My research examines how citizens make democracy work in the developing world, focusing on Latin America. Empirically, I combine cutting-edge techniques of causal inference, such as natural and survey experiments, with deep understanding of context through extensive fieldwork. My work has been published by Cambridge University Press (Comparative Politics Series), University of Michigan Press, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Perspectives on Politics.

My book, Incumbency Bias (Cambridge University Press. Studies in Comparative Politics), offers a unified theory that explains why citizens  favor incumbents with an electoral advantage in some political settings but punish them with an electoral disadvantage in other settings. The book marshals multiple sources of evidence collected in Brazil, Argentina and Chile during twelve months of fieldwork, including panel administrative datasets, interviews with politicians and policymakers, and three original survey experiments. It employs an innovative nested multilevel research design that combines cross-country comparisons with subnational quantitative tests using causal inference techniques, such as natural experiments, regression discontinuity designs, and differences-in-differences designs.

My  current research agenda includes two projects that examine citizens' role in the global crisis of democracy.  One book project (with Scott Mainwaring) explores the role of protection of civil liberties as a source of durable democratic commitment in Latin America. This paper summarizes our core argument and presents some of our evidence.  In other work, I am trying to understand why citizens have become so quickly yet deeply polarized in new democracies. This paper (with Noam Lupu and Virginia Oliveros) summarizes this research.