I am a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Department of Political Science, Stanford University. Previously, I was Postdoctoral Fellow at the DONDENA Center and a lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University College London in 2022.
My main research focuses on American political institutions, specifically the interaction between politics, bureaucracy, and populism, and its consequences for the quality of government. In my work, I study politicians’ incentives to control the behavior of bureaucratic agencies, lawmakers’ reliance on bureaucratic expertise, and the role of bureaucracy in shaping the political agenda. I introduce innovative measurement strategies that combine natural language processing techniques and machine learning to address novel questions in the study of oversight, rulemaking, and the use of information in the policymaking process. In a related line of research, I investigate why politicians adopt populist behaviors and examine the consequences of populism for government performance and the quality of bureaucracy.
I am the founder of the Public Policy Research Network (PPRN), an inter-university platform which aims to foster methodological training, cooperation, and debate between doctoral students working on the broad field of public policy and political economy.