Disaggregating Climate Policy

Why do some countries do more to mitigate their emissions of greenhouse gasses than others? Any climate policy has distributive implications, helping or hurting some groups of people and businesses more than others. But these distributive implications are often missing from comparative, quantitative work on climate politics, which tends to rely on nationally-aggregated measures of interests and policy. In order to take distributional conflict seriously, we need to disaggregate our theory and measures from the national level. My main project at the moment, the subject of my dissertation and several papers in progress, attempts to do so.

Text Analysis of Legislative Deliberation

New computational methods make it possible to examine political discourse with new levels of depth and breadth. I am currently working on two projects, one with Dr. Felix Krawatzek of the British Academy, and another with Niels Goet of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, on applying these methods to legislative debates. In the past, I have also worked on text analysis projects examining networks of news-sharing communities on Twitter.

Geography and Conflict

I use satellite data and geographical information systems to explore the relationship between intrastate armed conflict and its human and physical geographical context. In work with the New England Complex Systems Institute, I helped look at how the spatial location of ethnic groups affects the likelihood of conflict. More recently, I developed a new measure of terrain accessibility that helps explain why some conflicts last longer than others.