Dissertation Research
Scholars often assume that authoritarian states operate above the law or disregard the rule of law entirely. Through two years of fieldwork in the Middle East (Jordan, Palestine and Egypt), I found that citizens routinely use litigation to challenge public officials. And in many cases, litigants prevail over authoritarian state actors in the courthouse.
My dissertation, Litigating the Authoritarian State: Judicial Politics in the Middle East, explores the dynamics of legal contention under authoritarian rule. When and why do people living in authoritarian societies attempt to hold the state accountable to legal norms? When will judges issue verdicts that obligate authoritarian state actors to conform to law? What is the relationship between legal mobilization and alternative avenues of grievance pursuit, such as collective action?
To answer these questions, I leverage detailed interviews conducted in Jordan and Palestine between 2017 and 2018, survey experiments fielded in Egypt and Jordan, an original data set of Arab administrative court verdicts, a data set of Jordanian protests and administrative lawsuits, and participant observation in numerous Jordanian court sessions.
My dissertation, Litigating the Authoritarian State: Judicial Politics in the Middle East, explores the dynamics of legal contention under authoritarian rule. When and why do people living in authoritarian societies attempt to hold the state accountable to legal norms? When will judges issue verdicts that obligate authoritarian state actors to conform to law? What is the relationship between legal mobilization and alternative avenues of grievance pursuit, such as collective action?
To answer these questions, I leverage detailed interviews conducted in Jordan and Palestine between 2017 and 2018, survey experiments fielded in Egypt and Jordan, an original data set of Arab administrative court verdicts, a data set of Jordanian protests and administrative lawsuits, and participant observation in numerous Jordanian court sessions.
Diverse Research Interests
- Authoritarian Politics - My research on law and courts in authoritarian regimes is part of a broader fascination with authoritarian political systems and the institutions that underpin them. My book project with Nathan Brown, Samer Anabtawi and Julian Waller, Authoritarianism from the Inside: How State Institutions Realize Autonomy under Authoritarian Regimes (book manuscript), investigates authoritarian judiciaries, parliaments and religious establishments in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Post-Soviet space.
- Judicial Politics - My interest in judicial decision making extends beyond the Arab world. My working paper with Paul Wahlbeck, Choosing the Court's Vehicle: Supreme Court Agenda Setting (presented at MPSA conference) investigates how U.S. Supreme Court justices decide which cases to grant, deny or hold when screening petitions for certiorari.
- International Affairs and Foreign Policy - My article with Miles Evers and Aleksandr Fisher, Is There a Trump Effect: An Experiment on Political Polarization and Audience Costs (Perspectives on Politics 2019), uses survey experiments and causal mediation analysis to investigate how partisan polarization affects popular accountability over foreign policy decision-making, and specifically the public's willingness to punish leaders who back down on military threats. My working paper with Yonatan Lupu and Matthew Fuhrmann, Assessing the Predictive Power of Statistical Models of International Conflict (presented at Peace Science conference), offers a meta-analysis of the international conflict literature with suggestions on how to improve in-sample predictive validity in models of interstate disputes.