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2. International Trade
3. Emigrant Politics
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How the public formulates its preferences over political-economy issues, especially international economic policy such as trade, is an abiding interest. I am especially curious about when and how factors divorced from personal economic returns shape people's attitudes.

Transnational movements of people have opened up many new international connections in politics. Much research focuses on how migrants interact with and affect their host countries, but many migrants also retain links to their homelands. This strand of my research looks at how emigrants engage with home-country politics—and how home-country governments respond to this diaspora political participation.

I am interested in how space and distance shape political life, whether through behavior or institutions. This portion of my research has primarily focused on borders—jurisdictional boundaries—but how the physical scale of a jurisdiction affects its politics is another recurrent theme.

Scholars drawn to study politics naturally are interested in the things conventionally thought of as “political,” so forces and outcomes considered non-political get relatively less attention. But seemingly irrelevant things can hugely influence politics, and politics can have consequences far afield. Much of my research considers hypotheses that span this divide between politics and the rest of human experience.

Translating abstract ideas into observable data is often a challenge, especially in social-scientific settings: figuring out what variables are actually capturing about the real world and designing new measurements to complement or extend existing ones are key components of social-science methodology. Several of my works take this task on.