Biography

I am a political scientist with expertise in comparative political behaviour, European politics, and the politics of ethnicity and migration. I passed Comparative Politics and Formal and Quantitative Methodology general exams in the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2010 and will receive a PhD in Politics and Social Policy in July 2013.
My dissertation, ‘Identity and Information: Voter heuristics and support for redistributive policy’, examines the role of identity categories, such as region and ethnicity, in shaping public opinion toward welfare states. The empirical applications include global sets of cross-national surveys and case studies of the United Kingdom and Slovakia. I argue that individuals forming preferences over redistributive policies ask themselves how such policies would affect people like them, and that this approach is consistent with the goal of making inferences about individuals' own future interests.
I will use the Max Weber Fellowship to extend my dissertation's reach by adding case studies of two to three additional countries. I will also continue to add to the literature on the politics of immigration in Europe, and to the development and application of statistical methods for analysing cross-national surveys.
Fields of expertise: Comparative Political Economy, Comparative Behaviour, Ethnic Politics, European Politics, Quantitative Methodology, Survey Analysis.