In progress

Until recently, the empirical study of ideology in authoritarian regimes has received little attention. In these contexts, can ideology be used to describe the ways in which ordinary citizens organize their political attitudes and beliefs? Do these attitudes and beliefs exhibit structure and constraint? Answers to these questions in advanced democracies rely heavily on latent variables and their connection to ideological and partisan self-identification. But in many authoritarian regimes, the absence of clear political alternatives (along with weak and fluid partisan attachments) suggests a need for greater theorizing and a new set of tools. Using original data from a large-scale nationally representative survey, I study ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I draw on recent advances in psychology and sociology to introduce an understanding of ideology as a network. I find that citizen preferences are organized along four dimensions: democratic/authoritarian institutions, secularism/Islamism, internationalism/nationalism, and gender inclusivity/exclusivity. Those who prefer authoritarian institutions, Islamism, nationalism and gender exclusivity are more likely to self-report support for the regime and exhibit greater ideological constraint. These findings suggest that political preferences are organized and constrained, but heterogeneous — and speak to the regime's informational advantage in sustaining popular support for authoritarian rule.

Recent waves of protest have given rise to movement parties, or parties with strong ties to social movements that combine anti-system activism with opposition to governing parties and elites. We study the effects of Lebanon's 2019 October Revolution, a series of nationwide protests that took place over several months and targeted an extractive elite that has governed for two decades. Difference-in-differences estimates show that localities where protests took place were more likely to support movement parties in the election that followed the uprising. We attribute this effect to the exclusionary nature of the electoral system and show that support for movement parties was greatest in areas neglected by existing parties. Our findings contribute new insight into the relationship between protest movements and electoral behavior. Movement parties persistently struggle to channel anti-government, revolutionary opposition into support for electoral alternatives — but not where they are able to exploit the weaknesses of existing parties.

• Working paper

In authoritarian contexts, individuals often express greater support for the regime in public than in private. This gap—overreporting—is typically treated as a measurement problem rather than a political behavior to be explained. We argue that overreporting deserves greater attention in survey-based studies of regime support and is itself shaped by which social referents are salient to respondents. We develop and test an original framework identifying three sources of overreporting: expressive identification, behavioral conformity, and civic resources. Drawing on a pre-registered, nationally representative telephone survey of Iranians (N=1,999) with a double list experiment, we estimate regime support at 47 percent—roughly ten points below the 57 percent recorded by direct questioning. We find that expressive identification matters most: national pride and religiosity both predict overreporting. Preference falsification in Iran is shaped less by coercion than by the identity-based attachments the regime encourages—with implications for how scholars understand regime support in closed societies.

• Working paper

Do incumbent autocrats benefit from early elections and premature dissolutions of legislative bodies? Building on insights from the literatures on opportunistic election timing, cabinet duration and durability, and legislative bargaining, we argue that assembly dissolutions in authoritarian regimes can generate substantial political backlash. Our empirical approach focuses on the consequences of assembly dissolution on electoral and legislative behavior in Kuwait, where the Emir enjoys broad dissolution powers — despite a constitutional requirement that obligates him to submit his policy agenda for legislative approval. Our analysis draws on 60 years of electoral and legislative data from Kuwait. We find that assembly dissolution leads to greater electoral support for more active legislators and prompts legislators to oppose the government more frequently. Our article challenges the conventional wisdom that autocrats benefit from manipulating electoral and legislative institutions. Closer attention to legislative and electoral behavior in electoral autocracies — rather than macro-level regime outcomes — indicates that executive attacks on legislatures can often backfire in ways that the existing literature has not previously explored. As a greater number of authoritarian regimes crack down on democratic institutions, our theoretical framework provides new insight into the consequences of executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding in non-democracies.

Group identity often shapes political behavior, but unevenly. Events that highlight the boundaries between groups can activate identity, but the same event can produce very different responses across the groups it affects. We argue that this divergence depends on the ideological coherence of the affected groups: groups whose members share a coherent ideology channel identity-activating events into coordinated political behavior, while groups without such coherence fragment as members respond independently. We test this argument in the context of sectarian identity in Kuwait, exploiting the quasi-random drift of the Islamic lunar calendar as an exogenous shock to religious salience. Using roll call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly, we show that Muharram---whose rituals commemorate the defining historical rift between Sunnis and Shias---causes Shia legislators to fragment and Sunni legislators to consolidate. Both effects concentrate among groups predicted by the theory: ideologically coherent Sunni Islamist pairs consolidate while ideologically diverse Shia non-Islamist pairs fragment. By showing that the same event can fragment one group while consolidating another, the paper challenges accounts of identity as a uniform driver of political behavior and contributes to debates about the salience of religion in politics and its effects on elite behavior.

This paper demonstrates how open-source large language models (LLMs) can extract structured career data from Arabic CVs, enabling systematic analysis of political elite networks across time. Studies of elite networks have traditionally relied on labor-intensive manual data collection, challenges that are particularly acute in authoritarian states where institutional opacity obscures the informal networks through which power operates. Recent scholarship shows the promise of gathering elite data computationally, but most existing work examines English-language sources using proprietary models. Critical methodological questions remain: Can open-source models match proprietary performance? How do prompting strategies affect extraction quality? We address these questions using 1,087 Kuwaiti political elite CVs from biographical directories spanning 1997–2012. Using the open-source Qwen3-4B-Instruct model, we compare information extraction quality across different prompting approaches, from minimal baselines to highly engineered prompts that incorporate domain-specific rules for institution name standardization and inference logic. Enhanced prompts achieve a 97.5% success rate and reduce missing institutional affiliations by 50% — critical improvements for generating network data. Post-processing recovers all remaining failures, yielding 100% coverage and 6,401 structured career entries. While our contribution centers on the extraction pipeline, the resulting data enable several analytical pathways central to elite network research. The structured career histories support the construction of institutional co-membership networks spanning ministries, the military, business, academia, parliament, and the diplomatic corps — relationships especially relevant in authoritarian settings where informal ties often cross organizational boundaries. The data also support career sequence analysis to identify pathways to influence and allow researchers to link institutional experience to legislative behavior. By producing high-quality structured data at scale, our approach provides an empirical foundation for rigorous, replicable elite research in the Middle East and beyond.