I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. I hold a Ph.D in political science from Harvard University (2020). My research explores why large-scale experiments in citizen participation beyond elections (from participatory budgeting and public hearings to referenda and citizen initiatives) emerge in some places but not others, and the conditions under which citizen engagement can generate meaningful effects on the quality of democracy and governance. Specifically, my work examines three related issues: 1) the political conditions that generate gaps between formal adoption and implementation of participatory institutions, 2) why large-scale participatory institutions succeed or fail once implemented, and 3) why individuals devote their limited time to non-electoral political participation, the effects their participation can have, and how these vary across political contexts.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Politics (1 sole-authored, 1 co-authored), The Journal of Latin American Studies, and in two edited volumes. His work has been funded by the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard University Committee on General Scholarships and the Jean Aubrey Westengard Fund. Thanks to this generous funding, I was able to conduct 17 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, and to carry out an 1800 person nationally representative survey of community activists in Venezuela.
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