I study how ethnic inequality shapes institutional development, voting and redistributive preferences, and party system ethnification in ranked ethnic systems like India and the United States. I pursue these research questions using methods in historical political economy that emphasize causal identification, spatial and survey analysis, and extensive archival research. Beyond my work on ranked ethnic systems, I have developed two further substantive areas of research: the relationship between state capacity and class voting in a cross-national and party organization and party system institutionalization in the Indian states. My papers have been published in the , , , , , Perspectives on Politics and .
My research has been featured in the , , , and amongst others, and has won discipline-wide awards including the Heinz I Eulau award for the best paper published in the APSR in 2021, the Mancur Olson award for the best dissertation in political economy, the Franklin L. Burdett/Pi Sigma Alpha award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Editorial Best Paper award by Comparative Political Studies and the GESIS-Klingemann award for best paper on electoral politics.
I am an editor and contributor to , an inter-disciplinary academic blog on historical political economy. I also serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy and was formerly an associate editor of the Comparative Politics Newsletter for the CP section of APSA.