Research Interests
Regime Change, Populism & The Far-Right, Political Polarization, Comparative Political Behavior & Attitudes, Opposition Campaigns in Hybrid Regimes, Digital Authoritarianism.
Publications​
This chapter shows that populism puts liberal democratic institutions, like an independent judiciary, at risk. This is the case because independent courts are incompatible with populism’s resistance to constraints on the general will. This chapter argues that highly populist executives decrease judicial independence. However, this effect is conditioned by the legislative seat share of the chief executive’s party. When there is a high seat share of populists from the executive’s party in the legislature, a populist chief executive will have a stronger influence on policy outcomes. As a result, judicial independence is compromised, and a judiciary’s ability to act as a check on the legislature or executive is weakened. The relationship between populism and judicial independence is tested using an original dataset of legislative seat share of parties in 18 Latin American democracies from 1998 to 2017 and the Global Populism Database (GPD). A case study of Ecuador during the presidency of Rafael Correa is also presented. 


Given the recent surge of global populism, this article explores the relationship between Internet/social media and support for populist parties by focusing on the structure of the online marketplace. We argue that structure shapes digital networks’ incentives in terms of the content they favor, and marketing strategies they employ to distribute content on a mass scale. Specifically, concentrated/oligopolistic markets mean powerful digital entities that can leverage the regulatory process—thereby weakening constraints and incentivizing consumption/profit above all else. Consequently, these entities can freely favor more incendiary/attention-generating content, and use their outsized influence to saturate the online marketplace with targeted advertising—all of which can amplify the diffusion of populist rhetoric and intensify support bases. Using original data on Internet ownership concentration, social media user-traffic, and populist party vote share in 34 democracies, our findings suggest that concentration of Internet ownership and online audiences each contribute to rising support for populism.


Governments around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways but usually with references to scientist and expert-led advice. Since populism is inherently anti-expert, many scholars expected governments with populist leadership to be wary of expert-led advisory councils and adopt a science-skeptic discourse during this crisis (Kavakli 2020, Brubaker 2021, Bayerlein et al. 2021, Naushirvanov et al. 2022). However, not all populists responded to the pandemic in the same way (Brubaker 2021).  In contrast to some populist leaders such as Donald J. Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who conformed to such expectations, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey were the prominent right-wing populists that have not adopted a science-skeptic discourse or downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic. In this chapter, we argue that populist governments’ policy responses to COVID-19 vary, and this variation is shaped by the complex interaction of social, political, and economic pressures they encounter and by their constituencies’ policy expectations. We unpack this argument by focusing on the cases of Turkey and Israel. Netanyahu and Erdogan governments both adopted a pro-science discourse, took the pandemic seriously, and avoided conspiracy theories in the implementation of protective policies during the first year of the pandemic. However, the economic crisis Turkey faced during the pandemic restricted Erdogan government’s capabilities in implementing protective policies, whereas the more favorable economic situation in Israel allowed Netanyahu government to ramp up their protective policies without threatening the survival of their government. Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Trump and Netanyahu, pro-science and science-skeptic alike, all responded in ways consistent with their re-election objectives. This chapter contributes to the existing literature by introducing a striking yet undervalued variation in populist government behavior and discusses the limits of pro-science populism with respect to contextual pressures.


We have developed and made accessible for multidisciplinary audience a unique global dataset of the behavior of political actors during the COVID-19 pandemic as measured by their policy-making efforts to protect their publics. The dataset presents consistently coded cross-national data at subnational and national levels on the daily level of stringency of public health policies by level of government overall and within specific policy categories, and reports branches of government that adopted these policies. The data on these public mandates of protective behaviors is collected from media announcements and government publications. The dataset allows comparisons of governments’ policy efforts and timing across the world and can serve as a source of information on policy determinants of pandemic outcomes -- both societal and possibly medical. 
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How well have populist leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? There is a growing literature dedicated to populism and health outcomes. However, the ongoing pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to study whether populist leaders fared better or worse than their non-populist counterparts by using a much larger sample size. While there has been a fruitful debate over whether populism is responsible for worse health outcomes, much of the focus has centered around the overall effect of having populist parties in power, without testing for different explanatory mechanisms. We argue that populist leaders fuel mass political polarization, which increases the overall level of hostility among the population and reduces their willingness to comply with anti-COVID measures and, more generally, contribute to public good. We test this theory using the expert-coded V-Party Dataset which contains variables for the ideological characteristics for parties around the world, as well as weekly excess mortality from the World Mortality Dataset. In addition to the OLS regression analysis, we employ a causal mediation framework to account for the order of succession of populism and political polarization. Our empirical results corroborate our main hypothesis that populism fuels political polarization, which is, in turn, associated with higher excess mortality during the ongoing pandemic. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.


Right-wing populism has been gaining traction over the past two decades. Once relatively minor players in democratic politics, populist parties today mobilize millions of voters and garner unprecedented electoral support with their antiimmigrant discourse. But what has changed to make populists so much stronger now than in the last century? Explanations in the literature tend to focus either on economic concerns or the cultural threat posed by immigrants with distinct languages and traditions. This paper examines these explanations from the literature and builds on them to argue that perceptions of economic and cultural threats feed off each other, and increasingly so with increased immigration from less culturally similar regions. We begin with the assumption that voter sentiment toward non-natives runs the gamut from strongly negative to positive, with more voters being willing to support right-wing populists at the polls in line with increases in perceived economic concerns and fears that immigration will dilute or drown out native culture. When these combine — when increased flows of culturally distant immigrants coincide with economic hard times — voters who normally would support mainstream parties and tolerate immigration are more likely to turn to populists. We test arguments from the literature and our interactive hypothesis using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).


The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.