Ryan Jablonski, Associate Professor of Political Science

Associate Professor of Political Science
London School of Economics and Political Science

Cover of Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behavior, showing women and children drawing water at a Malawian water kiosk, beneath a sign crediting the EU, the European Investment Bank and the Malawi Government.

New book

Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2026) asks how democracy works in aid-dependent countries. Drawing on a decade of experiments, interviews and surveys with voters, politicians and donors, I show that voters do not simply reward politicians for aid: they condition their votes on beliefs about how far politicians shaped its delivery. The result is a visibility–uncertainty paradox, in which aid can either strengthen or erode democratic accountability depending on how donors choose to spend.

The book is freely available as an open-access title. Read it here.

I am a political scientist at the LSE. I study the political economy of service delivery in low-income democracies. I particularly focus on the ways in which politicians, bureaucrats and voters learn about and make decisions related to public spending, foreign aid and corruption. I also study electoral integrity and work on issues of electoral administration, fraud and violence.

Some major ongoing research programs include a study of the impacts of aid cuts and USAID's closure on politics and service delivery in aid-dependent democracies, the causes and consequences of corruption in health supply chains, and how politicians learn about constituency needs.

I teach courses on public policy, international development, comparative politics and research methods.

Ryan Jablonski

Publications

Working Papers