My dissertation examines the drivers of legislative effectiveness in countries where parties are mostly nonprogrammatic, meaning that most parties lack stable ideological commitments. Specifically, I investigate what accounts for variation in the effectiveness of legislators in advancing bills through the legislative process and into law under these circumstances. I adopt a mixed-methods approach that combines statistical analysis with semi-structured interviews and process-tracing of policy activity in Brazil. 

My research agenda also includes a co-authored paper with Dr. Matthew R. Cleary that documents the variation in the methods used by new parties in Mexico to select candidates for congressional office. Other works include "Budgetary Change in Authoritarian and Democratic Regimes" (co-authored with Frank R. Baumgartner, Marcello Carammia, Derek A. Epp, and Tevfik Murat Yildirim), published at the Journal of European Public Policy, and"Horizontal Social Movements and Agenda-Setting: Evidence from Brazil", published at Agenda Política.

I also work with the Brazilian Policy Agendas, which investigates trends in policymaking across time in the country and is a part of the Comparative Agendas Project.