Welcome! I study the moral foundations of democratic politics—how citizens’ ethical values shape their support for democracy, their political behavior, and their evaluations of those who represent them. My research is comparative in scope and combines survey experiments, text analysis, and causal inference with observational data. I am currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Government at Cornell University, where I work with Peter Enns and am affiliated with the Cornell Center for Social Sciences.
My dissertation-based book project asks how moral disagreement and the distribution of moral attitudes in society affect democratic support. Drawing on original surveys and experiments, it shows that the gap citizens perceive between their own moral attitudes and society’s is associated with weaker support for democracy. This question informs my wider research on electoral accountability, partisan policy attitudes, and the political effects of AI, as well as methodological work on the design of conjoint experiments.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Political Behavior, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, the Journal of European Social Policy, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. My public-facing writing has appeared in the Journal of Democracy (online exclusive), The Diplomat, and South Asian Voices., and my research has been supported by SSHRC, the Politics, Elections, and Representation Lab, and the Institute for Humane Studies.
Teaching is central to how I work as a scholar. I have taught substantive political science and research methods at the University of Toronto, the ICPSR Summer Program at the University of Michigan, and the Hertie School in Berlin, earning consistently strong evaluations. My commitment to making quantitative methods accessible has led Christopher Cochrane and me to begin a book on the subject, Applied Statistics: Learning by Heart, Mind, and Soul, intended for students who fear it, those who want to master it, and those who doubt it matters.
I earned my PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto (2024), a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School in Berlin (2016), and Bachelor and Master of Social Sciences degrees in Political Science from the University of Dhaka (2011 and 2012).