I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University, researching democratic accountability, political behavior, and the politics of development, with a focus on South Asia. Before joining Duke, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. I earned a PhD in Political Science from Yale University.

One line of my research examines how transformative changes in the welfare state influence voting behavior. A second strand attempts to explain why decentralization often fails to achieve expected improvements in public goods provision, local government capacity, and political responsiveness. A third focus area examines why citizens don’t hold elected officials accountable for negative outcomes, such as air pollution and inadequate responses to public health crises. I use a mixed-methods approach to study these issues, combining experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork.

In addition to research, I teach courses in comparative politics and quantitative methods for social scientific research. In 2020, I received a university-wide award at Yale for excellence in teaching.