I am an Associate Professor in the Government Department at the LSE. I study state capacity, redistributive politics, and vote choice in ranked societies like India and the United States. In doing so, my research has argued for the importance of studying group-base inequalities, particularly social status inequality, and how they shape redistributive preferences in ranked systems. I pursue these research questions using methods in historical political economy that emphasise causal identification, spatial and survey analysis, and archival research. Beyond my work on ranked systems, I have developed two further substantive areas of research: the relationship between state capacity and class voting in a cross-national perspective, and party organisation and party system institutionalisation in the Indian states.  

Before joining the LSE, I was an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. I completed a PhD in political science at Columbia University and I also hold an MPP in public policy from the Goldman School at UC Berkeley. My papers have been published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Perspectives on Politics and World Politics. My research has been featured in the New York Times, Le Monde, The Economist, and The Hindu amongst others.

I am a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize 2024 awarded triennially to early stage researchers in political science “whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising.” My research has also won discipline-wide awards including 1) Heinz I Eulau award for the best paper published in the APSR (2022), 2) the Mancur Olson award for the best dissertation in political economy (2018), 3) the Franklin L. Burdett/Pi Sigma Alpha award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association (2019), 4) the Editorial Best Paper award by Comparative Political Studies (2020) and the 5) GESIS-Klingemann award for best paper on electoral politics (2016) amongst others.

I am an editor and contributor to Broadstreet, an inter-disciplinary academic blog on historical political economy. I also serve on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies and the Journal of Historical Political Economy and was formerly an associate editor of the Comparative Politics Newsletter for the CP section of APSA.

I am currently working on a book manuscript on Endogenous State Capacity. You can read my recently published Annual Review of Political Science article on endogenous state capacity here.

You can read my CV here.