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 an Associate Professor of 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.
My work is published in American Political Science Review, Journal of Development Economics, International Studies Quarterly, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Experimental Political Science, World Development and elsewhere. I teach courses on public policy, international development, comparative politics and research methods.
