PhD Candidate · Ohio State University
Comparative Politics & International Relations
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, specializing in the politics of natural disasters and climate change. My research examines how exposure to tropical cyclones, floods, and other climate hazards shapes political trust, electoral competition, and government accountability — with a regional focus on Southern Africa and cross-national comparative work.
My dissertation investigates how climate shocks reshape political behavior and policy, drawing on original fieldwork in Malawi, geolocated survey data, and novel cross-national datasets on climate adaptation governance.
Existing literature on the electoral consequences of natural disasters suggests two possible effects: backlash and gratitude. In Malawi, Members of Parliament have commonly taken credit for disaster relief to strengthen their support, but these disasters are also an opportunity to criticise incumbents. This paper uses parliamentary election data to argue that disaster exposure results in partisan effects, while examining intraparty dynamics through primary elections reveals a more complex story about disaster exposure's differential effects on ruling versus opposition party incumbents.
Most scholarship on natural disasters in political science has focused on electoral or security consequences, leaving the causal linkages underspecified. This paper proposes an information shock theory to understand how state capacity and disaster response quality interact with disaster exposure, using geolocated Afrobarometer data from Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Tanzania to analyse the impact of hazard exposure on trust in the executive.
International climate frameworks mandate public participation in adaptation planning, yet we know little about whether consultation quality actually improves outcomes. This paper investigates whether deeper, more deliberative adaptation governance predicts stronger and more equitable policy outcomes across ~100 countries, using data from the forthcoming CLIPPS expert survey. Submitted as part of a Special Issue proposal to Global Environmental Politics.
This paper focuses on loss and damage — a relatively new issue in international climate politics — and proposes a theory of multilateral agenda setting that synthesises existing arguments regarding power relations, epistemic communities, and coalitional politics, drawing on evidence from COP negotiations and national-level speeches.
Why do some countries invest heavily in climate adaptation while others lag? This project argues that climate risk only translates into policy when democratic accountability incentivizes state action, and that international aid can inadvertently distort these domestic dynamics. With Sarah Brooks (Ohio State University).
This paper explores how the quality of primary elections affects candidates' vote share in general elections, assessing the comparative value of the party label in a Malawian context and arguing that primary electoral manipulation shapes downstream general election performance.
These studies have detailed pre-analysis plans with artificial data used to pre-specify data cleaning, hypothesis testing, and robustness checks prior to data collection.
Pre-analysis plan with simulated data. Submitted as part of a Special Issue proposal to Global Environmental Politics.
View on OSF →Pre-analysis plan with simulated data. Co-authored with Sarah Brooks (Ohio State University).
View on OSF →Experimental study on how deliberation between MPs and Village Development Committees shapes preferences for short- vs. long-term investments in disaster risk reduction.
View on OSF →Affecting the lives of over 185 million individuals in 2022, natural disasters stand out as a recurrent challenge around the globe. This course examines historical and contemporary episodes of crisis management from around the world. Students learn to conceptualise disasters and disaster management, explore what incentives drive politicians' actions, and examine when policy change is most likely to occur. Examples spanning flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, and pandemics highlight common challenges and important differences across disaster types.