Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence, The Politics of Inequality, at the University of Konstanz, where I am currently working on my book project, Who Gets to Play? Enfranchisement in the Absence of Democracy and several related papers.
I am interested in classic issues in comparative politics: regime change, political organizations and parties, social movements, identity formation, state-society relationships, and the relationship between material interests and ideas. My work seeks to explain why some social groups are excluded (or included) into The State, and how political parties organize, politicize, and mobilize everyday people excluded from formal political processes in diverse and developing places. Most of my work is macro-historical and focuses on explaining the dynamic processes behind how parties not only shape democratization from above but also from below in the rump states of continental empires (mainly the Austrian-Hungarian Empire).
My book project shows the intertwined relationship between party organizing, social service provision, and enfranchisement during regime change. It explains the rise of nationalist parties and the failure of democratic consolidation in the constituent states of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In other words, I study the negative cases of Europe’s first wave of democracy. The book traces the strategic actions of parliamentary parties regarding political inclusion (enfranchisement) and the responses of extra-parliamentary parties in civil society to political exclusion (disenfranchisement).
During eleven months of archival fieldwork, I collected and digitized micro-level data from the constituent states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This included electoral and census data, a dataset tracking local-level electoral violence and malpractice in the Kingdom of Hungary, and a dataset tracking political party entry, exit, and merger. Additionally, I compiled digitized data on the presence, function, and access to civil associations and mutual aid societies in the Kingdom of Hungary and Austrian Silesia and merged these data with various other datasets across several mismatched geographic units of analysis that span several regime changes. Lastly, I created a dataset documenting the requisites in electoral law that influenced the threshold of inclusion in 30 emerging European states from 1789 to 1945 and merged these data with data collected by Dawn Teele as well as Sebastian Cortesi, for ongoing work on the determinates of voting rights expansions in a historical and cross-regional perspective.
I am interested in classic issues in comparative politics: regime change, political organizations and parties, social movements, identity formation, state-society relationships, and the relationship between material interests and ideas. My work seeks to explain why some social groups are excluded (or included) into The State, and how political parties organize, politicize, and mobilize everyday people excluded from formal political processes in diverse and developing places. Most of my work is macro-historical and focuses on explaining the dynamic processes behind how parties not only shape democratization from above but also from below in the rump states of continental empires (mainly the Austrian-Hungarian Empire).
My book project shows the intertwined relationship between party organizing, social service provision, and enfranchisement during regime change. It explains the rise of nationalist parties and the failure of democratic consolidation in the constituent states of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In other words, I study the negative cases of Europe’s first wave of democracy. The book traces the strategic actions of parliamentary parties regarding political inclusion (enfranchisement) and the responses of extra-parliamentary parties in civil society to political exclusion (disenfranchisement).
During eleven months of archival fieldwork, I collected and digitized micro-level data from the constituent states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This included electoral and census data, a dataset tracking local-level electoral violence and malpractice in the Kingdom of Hungary, and a dataset tracking political party entry, exit, and merger. Additionally, I compiled digitized data on the presence, function, and access to civil associations and mutual aid societies in the Kingdom of Hungary and Austrian Silesia and merged these data with various other datasets across several mismatched geographic units of analysis that span several regime changes. Lastly, I created a dataset documenting the requisites in electoral law that influenced the threshold of inclusion in 30 emerging European states from 1789 to 1945 and merged these data with data collected by Dawn Teele as well as Sebastian Cortesi, for ongoing work on the determinates of voting rights expansions in a historical and cross-regional perspective.