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 often conflated, this paper separates the two traits 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 produces clear electoral backlash: at the next municipal election voters shift their support toward more moderate candidates. Electing a populist mayor generates no comparable punishment. The most plausible explanation for these differences lies in behavior in office: extreme-right mayors govern as 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. Right-wing extremism has risen across many democracies. One possible explanation is that political office has become less attractive: when the rewards of office decline, the candidates willing to enter politics may be drawn disproportionately from ideological extremes. This paper tests this mechanism in Brazilian mayoral elections. The analysis constructs a candidate-level measure of ideology from the text of campaign platforms and exploits an exogenous change in mayoral salaries to estimate how compensation affects the ideological composition of mayoral candidates. Higher salaries reduce the share of candidates classified as extreme right, suggesting that the attractiveness of political office shapes the ideological composition of those who run for it.
“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. To do so, we are building a dataset of every central government employee in Britain between 1660 and 1830, capturing not just their numbers but eight measures of bureaucratic rationalization: structured career progression, functional specialization, remuneration through salaries rather than user fees, centralized control over salaries, higher salaries, increased time in office, the delinking of bureaucratic and political careers, and reduced nepotism. Consistent with the existing literature, we find that increases in the number of bureaucrats occur during war. [Visual inspection shows a mixed relationship between preliminary measures of bureaucratic quality and a similarly mixed relationship between quality and political change.]
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