research
Democratic diffusion
Democracy in the world increases - more and more countries are democratic - and clusters - countries bordering on other democracies have a higher chance of being a democracy, and of making a transition to democracy. Why? That is exactly what my dissertation is about.
Latest working paper: An agent-based model of democratic diffusion.
A draft version of my dissertation can be found here.
An earlier conference paper studying the presence of democratic diffusion while controlling for the geographic clustering of economic development can be found here: Democratic and economic diffusion.
Russian politics
An earlier step in my research on democratic diffusion focused on Russia’s subnational regions. Studying the vote for the liberal-democratic parties Yabloko and Soyuz Pravikh Sil in the 1999 Duma elections as a proxy for pro-democratic attitudes in Russia’s 89 regions, an estimate is made of the extent to which democratic attitudes cluster geographically at a subnational level.
My latest, but dated working paper: Differences in democratic sentiment in Russia’s regions explained.
General research interests
Quantitative methods in political science
Spatial econometrics (see links page)
Agent-based modeling
Russian politics
European politics
Democratization
Comparative political institutions
Political philosophy, in particular studies on citizenship