Associate Professor of Politics
New York University

Welcome. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. I am a scholar of electoral systems, distributive politics, and the politics of contemporary Japan. In 2023-2024, I am a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University.  

I have written extensively about the effects of electoral systems on politicians’ policy priorities, ideological positions, and decisions about the allocation of central government resources. Recently, I have been interested in distributive politics. My research is inspired by substantively-important questions in Japanese politics, and I have created data sets for my own research that are now available for use by others. I use text-as-data approaches, quasi-experiments, and qualitative analysis.

Prior to coming to NYU, I was a Research Fellow at Australian National University. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. My undergraduate education took place in my native New Zealand. I have studied at the University of Tokyo and have spent several years living and studying in Japan.

I am a co-founder and organizer of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS). I also organize and host the Frontiers in Empirical Research on East Asia conference at NYU (FEREA).