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

One line of my research looks at how transformative changes in the welfare state affect voting behavior. A second strand seeks to explain why decentralization often fails to deliver expected improvements in public goods provision, local state capacity, and political responsiveness. A third line of work focuses on why citizens don’t hold elected officials accountable for bad outcomes like air pollution and inadequate response to public health crises. I employ a mixed-methods approach to study these issues, using experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork.

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