Papers

Effective institutions for self-governance are often understood as the product of long-run historical development rather than something that can be deliberately constructed. We test this assumption by examining whether fiscal incentives can generate local organizational capacity in communities with no prior formal governance structures. We study a 2024 policy that devolved 10\% of Mexico's federal social policy budget directly to more than 18,500 Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. While communities with formally recognized indigenous authorities qualified automatically, we focus on a subset of roughly 2,500 communities with comparatively little pre-existing institutional infrastructure that became eligible if 40\% of residents self-identified as Indigenous or Afro-Mexican in the 2020 census. We exploit this threshold in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the program's effect on local organizational capacity, defined as communities' ability to plan, coordinate, and execute public spending on local development projects, proxied using administrative data and high-resolution remote sensing of changes in built infrastructure and nighttime luminosity. To unpack the political mechanisms linking fiscal incentives to organizational capacity, we complement these measures with in-depth qualitative interviews with local residents and leaders.

American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) populations are largely misunderstood or unknown to many political scientists. This project aims to give scholars a guide to understanding the dimensions of AIAN communities across the United States, including settings from urban, reservation, and in-between. Leveraging Census data, it walks readers through the different dimensions of AIAN communities, creates a typology of AIAN communities, and analyzes contemporary demographic shifts related to reservation border towns.

This project investigates legislative behavior in the Cherokee Nation Council, offering one of the first systematic analyses of voting patterns in a tribal government. Using comprehensive roll-call records from 1975 to the present, it explores three core questions: how councilors introduce and pass legislation, how ideological dimensions structure disagreement, and whether conflicts emerge around at-large representation and distributive spending. The study begins with descriptive analysis of bill sponsorship, passage rates, and vote margins, then applies the NOMINATE algorithm to assess the dimensionality of Cherokee politics. Finally, it tests hypotheses about the effects of at-large councilors—who represent citizens outside the Nation’s boundaries—and the politics of pork spending. By opening the “black box” of tribal legislatures, this project situates American Indian lawmaking within broader theories of representation, coalition-building, and institutional conflict, while also producing a replicable dataset for future research on Native governance.