working papers

I study social change and cooptation in autocracies at both micro and macro levels. This leads to three ongoing research agendas.

1. Long-run impacts of revolutionary mobilization

This line of work focuses on the effects of mobilization in revolutionary conflicts for long-run post-revolutionary stratification not only in access to positions of power but also in capacities (human capital) and connections (social networks). I theorize and test for “bottom-up” state-society interactions rooted in revolutionary mobilization. I also focus on the family as an important conduit for intergenerational transfers of benefits and networks centered on the nation-state. This relies on a unique intergenerational and genealogical dataset collected from heavily mobilized communities in upland Laos. The data collection effort involved local communities and brought to bear local historical knowledge.

The pull of the center: the mobilizational roots of transformation in social revolution Revise & Resubmit at World Politics.

Abstract:

I study how marginalized people have become integrated into networks centered on the state through revolutionary mobilization. Using a unique genealogical dataset from Laos, I test for the intergenerational, biographical effects of wartime mobilization into a revolutionary political party. In Laos, revolutionary mobilization in the 1960s pulled in individuals from peripheries into political organizations. Results show that descendants of such people were then over twice as likely to work for the party-state than people from similar, unmobilized families. Descendants were over five times as likely to have a cross-ethnic marriage and more than eight times as likely to attain a college diploma, among other social shifts. Mobilization conferred abilities and created opportunities for social advancement, leading to self-sustaining political and economic benefits, which have been transmitted within reconstituted families. The nature of revolutionary mobilization itself is an important, neglected, factor in post-revolutionary social transformation and class formation in revolutionary autocracies.

Ties that rebind: kinship networks and long-run postwar integration (in preparation)

Abstract:

In nations divided by violent conflict, conventional wisdom suggests that those on the losing side face elimination, persecution, and lasting marginalization. Yet systematic evidence from communities divided by an intensive revolutionary conflict shows that even without formal reconciliation policies, descendants of those on the losing-side can end up outperforming their neighbors with more favorable histories. Using a unique intergenerational dataset from communities in Laos, I show that kinship connections crossing factional lines are the primary mechanism driving this integration. Children of mixed families, including direct descendants of losing soldiers, attained skilled employment and higher education at rates exceeding even those from purely revolutionary families. The social geography of conflict is thus fundamental to whether political divisions persist or dissolve over generations: where conflict cuts across rather than reinforces existing kinship networks, social life absorbs political divisions from the bottom up, independently of and sometimes despite official policy.

1.1 Revolutionary mobilization: legacies in defeat

This agenda extends the mobilization framework to Thailand, where the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) waged a rural insurgency from the 1960s through the 1980s before being defeated. Using original survey and oral history data collected through community partnerships in Isan, northeastern Thailand, I study the long-run consequences of revolutionary participation in a context of defeat rather than victory, illuminating how mobilization shapes life trajectories, and paths of political development, regardless of revolutionary outcome. I replicate the data collection effort previously conducted in Laos, allowing for direct comparisons tracing how the impacts of revolutionary mobilization acted on two very different revolutionary trajectories.

The long-run effects of revolutionary mobilization: evidence from the CPT (data collection)

Who stays in opposition? (with Somchai Phatharathananunth, data collection)

2. A historical perspective on authoritarian institutionalization

This line of research progresses at a macro, global level. I argue that institutional change during the third wave of democratization can be more parsimoniously understood by accounting for the impact of economic shocks on authoritarian coalitions. I study authoritarian institutions in the historical context of the 1970s and 1980s, when they steadily emerged across the world in a range of country contexts.

Economic shocks, sovereign debt, and authoritarian institutions in the third wave (in preparation)

Abstract

I offer a reevaluation of the history of authoritarian institutionalization, which centers the global economic shocks of the 1970s rather than the end of the Cold War. I find that institutionalization occurred after debt buildups. Debt buildups, in turn, happened as developing countries used favorable commodity shocks to jump-start attempts at economic growth and transformation. In addition to cooptation and credible commitments, I argue that institutionalization helped solve principal-agent problems in the process of debt-fueled growth by allowing for limited areas of political and economic competition; functions related to cooptation and credible commitments also widened the scope of politically feasible competition. I also find that debt flows to institutionalized regimes were less sensitive to subsequent negative economic shocks than flows to uninstitutionalized regimes, suggesting that lenders responded favorably to institutionalization.

3. The local correlates of democratic transition

In another developing research agenda on the local politics of authoritarian coalitions, with Napon Jatusripitak, I study how personalistic voting in Thailand responds to structural as well as short-run political factors. We theorize and apply a novel measure of personalism with national-level coverage across constituencies, leveraging ballot design and the random assignment of candidate and party numbers in Thai elections. Results show that even isolated victories for programmatic parties, by weakening local brokerage networks, can undermine the local foundations of electoral autocracies.

The democratic externalities of programmatic electoral victory: evidence from Thailand (with Napon Jatusripitak, in preparation)

Can programmatic political parties reshape personalistic electoral systems? Exploiting random assignment of ballot numbers in Thai elections, we construct a measure of personalistic voting covering all constituencies, allowing us to systematically answer this question through a unique national-level panel study of the determinants of personalistic voting. Against predominant structuralist accounts, we find that programmatic parties weaken personalism in the short-run simply by coming to power locally, even in an electoral autocracy where they are prevented from forming a government. A range of empirical strategies, including a regression discontinuity design, show that constituencies where the liberal Move Forward Party came to power in 2023 saw significantly less personalistic voting in 2026. Evidence from interviews conducted in closely contested constituencies suggests that this was due to the weakening of underlying brokerage networks under programmatic incumbents. Even when victory is partial, programmatic parties can weaken the local, clientelistic, foundations of electoral autocracies.