research
Working Papers
“Extremism Is Self-Undermining, but Populism Is Not.” — Job Market Paper
Abstract. Does holding office strengthen or weaken the long-term appeal of right-wing extremism and populism? Although populism and extreme-right ideology are distinct concepts, they are rarely measured separately. This paper does so, using supervised text classification of candidate platforms to construct continuous candidate-level scores. It then exploits close mayoral elections in Italian municipalities, extending close-election politician-characteristic regression discontinuity to continuous treatments. Electing an extreme-right mayor is self-undermining: the next municipal election shifts toward more moderate candidates. Support for extreme-right parties also appears to decline in subsequent national and European elections. By contrast, electing a populist mayor does not weaken the subsequent appeal of populism. The most plausible explanation for these differences lies in behavior in office: extreme-right mayors behave like ideologues, pursuing welfare retrenchment even at electoral cost, while populist mayors appear to act as office-seekers, with welfare expansion concentrated where re-election incentives remain.
“Paying for Moderation: The Impact of Financial Incentives on Political Extremism.”
Abstract. What drives political extremism? Most explanations focus on voters. Yet before voters can elect an extremist, one must decide to run, and who runs may depend on what the office is worth. If extremists have stronger policy motives, while moderates enter only when material rewards justify the costs, making office less attractive should produce a more extreme candidate pool. Causal evidence remains scarce because political compensation rarely changes independently of the other conditions shaping candidate entry. This paper exploits constitutional population thresholds in Brazil that generate discontinuous increases in mayoral compensation across otherwise similar municipalities. To measure ideological selection among winners and losers in the 2024 elections, it scores candidates' legally required government proposals using two independently constructed measures: transformer classifiers trained on hand-labeled paragraphs from earlier elections and a calibrated ensemble of large language models that accounts for correlated errors and rare extreme platforms. Preliminary results show that higher salaries reduce extreme-right candidacies and the likelihood of electing an extreme-right mayor. Political extremism is shaped not only by whom voters choose, but also by what makes political office worth contesting.
“War, Politics, and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy” (with Alexander Lee and Anil Menon)
Abstract. A large literature has examined the “rise of the state” in early modern Europe, focusing on the increase in the capacity of states due to war. However, state institutions were increasing not only in size but also in their quality, through the creation of “modern” or “Weberian” bureaucracies. To illustrate these distinct processes, our project examines the state in early modern Britain, often cited as the ideal type of a bureaucratic transformation. We use an original dataset of every central government employee in Britain between 1660 and 1860, capturing not just their numbers but four measures of bureaucratic rationalization: functional specialization, remuneration through salaries rather than user fees, higher salaries and increased time in office. Consistent with the existing literature, we find that war is associated with an increase in the size of the bureaucracy, though quality does not change. Quality improvements are associated with periods that combined close political competition and fiscal pressure. The results suggest that while military pressure can expand bureaucracies, their reform is a political project.
Presentations
“Extremism Is Self-Undermining, but Populism Is Not.”
- American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, September 2026 (forthcoming)
- Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth), East Lansing, MI, July 2026 (forthcoming)
“War, Politics, and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy” (with Alexander Lee and Anil Menon)
- American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, 2023