Welcome to my website!

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Democracy Institute, Central European University. In addition, I am a research associate at the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) at Waseda University (Japan). My research focuses on popular protests, voting behavior, democratization, or autocratization, with a regional focus on Latin America.

I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Missouri in 2021. Before taking up my position in Budapest, I was an assistant professor at WIAS, a postdoctoral fellow at the V-Dem Institute, and a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University.

My book manuscript, Crisis of Democracy: Protest and Affective Polarization, systematically examines the relationship between political protests and mass polarization in democracies. My central argument is that protests serve as a focal event that may change voters’ perceptions. In this project, I seek to expand psychological approaches to mass polarization by theorizing and testing how political protests may enhance individual partisan identities. Specifically, I consider how exposure to protests activates and reinforces pre-existing partisan identities - including positive and negative- and ultimately triggers affective polarization. I utilize a range of quantitative analyses, including time-series and cross-national studies and survey analysis with a natural experiment, to study the effect of protests on the level of polarization cross- and sub-nationally. I also triangulate quantitative methods with qualitative data gathered during my fieldwork in Brazil.

Beyond my book project, I actively research the effect of protests on democratization or policy change, the consequences of populism in Latin America, the determinants of far-right parties' support in new democracies, and sequences of democratization or autocratization. Across those topics, I have published articles in Policy Studies Journal, Electoral Studies, Political Research Quarterly , and Democratization.

Download my CV.