Research

Publications:

Under Review:

Working Papers/Works in Progress:

  • “Who Makes the State? National Ownership and International Statebuilding: Evidence from an Electoral Authoritarian Regime” with Susanna Campbell and Yolande Bouka.
  • “Securing the Ballot or the Voter: The Politics of Policing Election Violence.”
  • “Neighborhood Watches and Reporting Crime in Uganda: Evidence from a List and Endorsement Experiment” EGAP ID: 20180605AC.

Selected Media Publications:

Book Project (In preparation):

  • “The Repression Dilemma: The Politics of Policing in Multi-ethnic Societies” (See book proposal here)

    Why do some people cooperate with police in the provision of law and order in autocracies while others are not even willing to report crimes to police? Drawing on a principal-agent framework, I theorize autocrats face a tradeoff between policing effectiveness and repressive compliance. This tradeoff has implications for how citizens interact with police. By developing and testing the theory in Uganda, a multiethnic autocracy, I argue regimes partially solve their security tradeoff by employing ethnicity as a social radar, strategically staffing police officers. Although using outsiders to police communities increases repressive compliance, it exacerbates coethnic bias decreasing citizens’ willingness to cooperate with police in the provision of law and order. Consequently, actions autocrats take to ensure police are willing to comply with orders to repress decrease citizens’ cooperation in the provision of law and order and weaken one of the defining features of the state. To test the observable implications of the theory, I use a multi-method approach. This approach includes a series of preregistered survey experiments (a nationally representative list experiment, conjoint design experiment in Gulu district, and a nationally representative endorsement experiment); quantitative analyses of crime and political violence data at the district level; and elite interviews. The results have implications for how we think about state (dis)order, conflict, human rights, and security sector reform.

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