Research

My research uses computational methods to address questions in three areas. Click a card to learn more.

Digital Governance

How do different regimes implement internet control? I study content moderation in democracies, filtering and blackouts in autocracies, and the concept of digital sovereignty.

Computational Social Science

I build specialized language models, such as ConfliBERT and ConflLlama, to create structured data from unstructured text, focusing on political conflict and event coding.

Democratic Institutions & Backsliding

How do executives expand power within democratic frameworks? I study legislative oversight, executive aggrandizement, and institutional resilience in parliamentary democracies.

Digital Governance & Censorship

Electoral Accountability and Government Content Removal: Theory and Evidence from Google Transparency Reports with Pengfei Zhang | Under Review

How does regime type shape a state’s intervention in its information environment? We develop a political agency model showing that democratic governments refrain from direct takedowns and delegate to courts because electoral accountability disciplines politicians through reputation-building incentives. Using Google transparency reports and quasi-experimental variation in election timing, we show that takedown requests from democratic governments decline significantly as elections approach, a reputational discipline effect absent in authoritarian regimes and other request types.

Two Types of Censorship? An Assessment of the Informational Autocracy Thesis with Pengfei Zhang | Under Review

Testing how Guriev & Treisman’s Informational Autocracy theory applies to internet filtering practices in autocratic nations.

Dissertation: Digital Sovereignty: The Political Economy of Internet Governance Slides

Computational Social Science & NLP

Extractive versus Generative Language Models for Political Conflict Text Classification with Patrick T. Brandt, Sultan Alsarra, Vito D’Orazio, Dagmar Heintze, Latifur Khan, Javier Osorio, and Marcus Sianan Political Analysis | Link | Slides | Code

ConflLlama: Domain-Specific Adaptation of Large Language Models for Conflict Event Classification with Patrick T. Brandt Research & Politics | Link | Slides | Code

Build, Borrow, or Just Fine-Tune? A Political Scientist’s Guide to Choosing NLP Models | Under Review Draft [PDF] | Code

Event Horizon: Revolutionizing Data Annotation with Reinforcement Learning | Working Paper Model on Hugging Face

ConfliBERT Documentation View Manual

Democratic Institutions & Backsliding

The Attention Trap: How International Celebrity Intervention Displaces Policy Discourse in Protest Movements | Working Paper Draft [PDF]

Does international celebrity attention help or hinder social movements? Analysing 1.08 million tweets from the 2020–2021 Indian farmer protests, I measure the effect of celebrity attention shocks on protest discourse. When Rihanna tweeted about the protests on 2 February 2021, daily volume rose 22-fold, but the share of tweets discussing policy issues fell by 10 percentage points while celebrity and meta-commentary rose by 45 percentage points. I call this the attention trap: celebrity intervention maximises visibility while displacing the substantive discourse movements depend on. Local projection impulse responses show this displacement is specific to the celebrity channel: domestic events, including state violence at Lakhimpur Kheri, generate policy-focused responses without comparable displacement. The cost was strategically exploitable: the BJP launched a coordinated nationalist counter-campaign within hours, on discursive terrain made favourable by the displacement itself.

Legislating Without Scrutiny: Executive Aggrandizement and Democratic Erosion in India | Working Paper Draft [PDF]

In September 2020, India’s Parliament passed three farm laws after under two hours of debate, with no committee referral: a procedural collapse, not an aberration. Under the BJP-led NDA, committee referral rates fell from 73% to 6%, and bills that once took nearly a year now clear Parliament in weeks. Drawing on 1,008 parliamentary bills, automated text analysis of 881 central acts, and cross-national democracy indicators, I document a systematic pattern of executive aggrandizement: the legal, incremental expansion of executive power at the expense of parliament, the judiciary, subnational governments, and citizens. A synthetic control analysis shows India’s judicial constraints declined significantly after 2014 (ATT = -0.051, p = 0.024); all eight V-Dem democracy indicators I examine declined under the NDA even after controlling for pre-existing trends.

Strategic Anticipation and Expert Review: The Determinants of Critical Advisory Opinions from the Dutch Council of State with Clara Egger & Asya Zhelyazkova | Under Review

What determines whether an expert advisory body issues a critical opinion on a legislative proposal? Drawing on a novel dataset of 2,898 advisory opinions issued by the Dutch Council of State (Raad van State) between 2004 and 2025 (2,111 on laws and 785 on executive decrees), we test five competing mechanisms. Instrument type is the strongest predictor of opinion severity: executive decrees receive dramatically milder treatment, with 69% drawing no objections compared to just 13% for laws. Among laws, junior coalition partners attract significantly less critical opinions than leading parties, consistent with anticipatory compliance. Ideological distance from the cabinet median matters, though the effect is modest. The Council’s most consequential effects operate through institutional deference to delegated legislation and the anticipatory self-discipline of politically exposed actors.

Framework Laws and Fading Oversight: How the Dutch Executive Expanded Its Lawmaking Authority with Clara Egger & Asya Zhelyazkova | Under Review

Examining executive predominance in the Netherlands using a legislative dataset spanning 2000–2025. Roughly 75% of legislation now takes the form of secondary executive acts, while MPs retreat toward weaker oversight tools.

Populism and Investment Treaties with Clint Peinhardt | Working Paper

Investigating how nationalist rhetoric influences countries’ decisions to exit international investment agreements.

IGO Withdrawal Networks | Working Paper

Extending Borzyskowski & Vabulas (2019) to examine network effects in international organization withdrawals.

Media Polarization in International News Coverage with Arslan Khalid & Kiwan Park | Working Paper

Using machine learning to analyze ideological patterns in international news coverage across 200,000+ articles.

Public Health Advocacy in Times of Pandemic: An Analysis of the Medicare-For-All Debate on Twitter During COVID-19 with Sushant Kumar & Pengfei Zhang Behavioral Sciences | Link | Code