My current book project, under the working title Sectarian Constituencies 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, which use markedly different formal institutions to channel their cleavages through the political system.

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. The paper, forthcoming in Political Analysis, is available here .

I also study economic development under conditions of weak or absent state institutions, in which people rely on informal institutions of conflict regulation as imperfect substitutes for formal state institutions in providing the rule of law. A recent working paper, presented at the 2008 Middle East Studies Association annual conference, examines Yemeni attitudes toward the use of tribal law and their views on the role of tribes in the country's economic development. An early draft of the work is available here .

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.