Biography

My research interests include political communication, parties, behavior, European politics, comparative democratic institutions, and research methodology.  I am currently writing a book about how parties’ organizations affect candidate strategies, representation, and electoral success.  I am also working on several projects that examine the institutions that regulate party diversity, the normative implications of party organizations for representation, and how political information shapes consumer sentiment.  The methods I employ include formal theory, experiments, statistics, and interviews. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2008, and spent the 2008-2009 academic year as a Postdoc in the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. I currently run the “UCLA Political Party Organizations Lab,” in which undergraduate researchers and I collect and code constitutions and rules from political parties around the world.  At UCLA, I teach courses on political communication, media and politics, and research methodology.