Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and core faculty in the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. Previously, I held a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 2020.
My research focuses on political behavior, political economy and party politics, primarily in rich postindustrial democracies. My book project, tentatively titled Stuck: Place, Mobility, and the Radical Right, examines how residential choices and constraints contribute to electoral realignment and growing support for radical right parties in the knowledge economy. A growing literature has examined how spatial inequalities, residential choices, and housing markets shape political preferences, emphasizing how place identities, local attachments, and sorting and self-selection shape contemporary political cleavages and resentment towards the established status quo across rich democracies. To date, however, scholars have treated residential mobility as a given and thereby overlooked the fundamental role that residential mobility constraints play in structuring social identities, societal attitudes, and political choices. This study develops and tests a theory of how residential choices and constraints contribute to electoral realignment and growing support for radical right parties. To do so, it first brings to light how the flexible knowledge economy simultaneously places strong emphasis on individual mobility while powerfully constraining it. In societies where social safety nets have weakened, “flexible,” non-standard employment become increasingly commonplace, and spatial inequalities in opportunity, economic activity, and prosperity grown ever wider, citizens’ capacity to access opportunities and respond to changing circumstances -- and by extension their well-being and (in)security -- heavily depends on their residential mobility. Yet, for many, the skyrocketing of housing and living costs in high-opportunity agglomerations renders such places and the opportunities they provide increasingly out of reach.
Uncovering this dynamic, this study argues that residential mobility and the lack thereof have wide-reaching socio-psychological and political consequences. By generating a deep sense of what I call “stuckness” and an inability to respond to the demands of the knowledge society, mobility constraints serve as a central lens through which individuals make sense of themselves, their opportunities, and the social and political environments they inhabit. Drawing on analyses of original surveys, fine-grained local-level data, and extensive ethnographic research across Western Europe, I demonstrate how this sense of “stuckness” evokes deep symbolic meaning and concern over social recognition, status anxiety, and stagnation. In so doing, it renders the radical right -- with its protectionist, nationalist agenda and populist rhetoric on the rootless “cosmopolitan” elites and the “ordinary,” “left-behind” populations -- particularly well-placed to capitalize on the economic and cultural concerns this sense of “stuckness” generates. Taken together, this study offers important novel insights into contemporary political divides, the politics of place, and the political-economic roots of electoral realignment. This research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Embassy of France in the United States, the Thanks to Scandinavia Foundation and the Cornell Institute for European Studies.