Research

I research how constituencies shape the strategic context their leaders navigate at all levels of analysis. In the broadest sense, I am interested in understanding the relationship between, as Schelling put it, the micromotives of actors and the macrobehavior of the system within which they interact. In practice, my research tends to focus on how voter preferences affect the behavior of leaders engaged in international bargaining and how states’ preferences shape great powers’ hegemonic ambitions.

Methodologically, I integrate formal theory, computational modeling, experiments, and small-N estimators, and develop new tools that fuse modeling with inference, targeting precisely where data is most scarce but most informative.

My research is organized along three lines of investigations (links):

1. How do states navigate a world where international orders and wars coevolve?
2. How does the shape of public preferences bind or free leaders to signal, escalate, or conciliate?
3. How can we maximize learning from scarce and strategically selected data?