My current book project, under the working title Ethnic Clientelism in the Middle East, examines the institutional incentives that privilege coordination on ethnic (sectarian, tribal, regional) political coalitions over "policy" coalitions, and the patronage dynamics that result from reliance on ethnic coalitions. In particular, I develop the conditions under which ethnic monopsonies develop in the market for votes, producing a particularly undesirable equilibrium in which resources flow disproportionately to elites at the expense of their coethnic mass constituents. Empirically, I use interview and survey data collected in Lebanon and Yemen. You can read a draft of the introductory chapter here .

My research interests in quantitative methods focus on response bias and eliciting truthful answers to sensitive questions on surveys. In this field, I have developed a new statistical estimator that enables multivariate modeling of list experiment data. My Political Analysis paper, available here , won the 2010 Warren Miller Prize. An applied paper on vote buying is available here .

Additional research examines religious politics. A forthcoming piece in World Politics , available here , studies sectarian and ecumenical public discourse in Lebanon. It relies on unobtrusive measurement of political and religious iconography survey respondents display outside their homes to provide a window into this discourse.

Another small study of possible interest to readers is one in which I analyzed political cartoons and caricatures in Yemen. The paper, published in PS: Political Science & Politics, is available here.