When does economic change displace established elites—and when do they capture the benefits for themselves? My research shows how Britain's expanding overseas trade was incorporated into existing parliamentary elites, and how the Industrial and Demographic Revolutions in Britain increased competitive pressures on elites, and hastened dynastic decline. I'm now using machine vision to assemble new historical data on where trade occurred from the Port Books, opening up questions about how the geography of economic change links to elite persistence.

I study institutional emergence, breakdown and persistence with an interest in the mechanisms at play. My book manuscript-in-progress on the emergence of electoral contestation in England traces how elite bargains over parliamentary seats systematically broke down and public, adversarial political selection became established. In the 19th century, I show how population and political power shaped a new geography of representation, and the political consequences that emerged. Across these projects, I am especially interested in the beliefs that sustain and transform institutions. New work asks what political scientists mean when the invoke “norms,” and how distinct notions of norms operate in our explanations.

My work shows how the political gains of Black people in the mid-century United States were not enough to prevent the rise of race-based incarceration, but also where exclusionary strategies appear absent: polling-place relocation does not systematically disadvantage non-co-partisans in North Carolina in recent times. I’m now tracing how federal funding built local police capacity, why some places received more, and what those investments changed over the short and long run—bringing a historical perspective to debates over police funding.

How can we infer causality when meaning emerges through interaction and interpretation? My work shows why assigning a conversational policy does not identify the effects of the messages it produces. I'm now developing experiments that identify message effects within ongoing conversations and a theory of how social constructs operate through shared categorization and interpretation—and what causal studies can establish about them.