Research

My mixed-methods research examines relationships between civil society, democratic politics, development, and inequality in the three most populous, developing world democracies: Brazil, India, and Indonesia. 

Politics of Civil Society, Development & Inequality in Brazil

My book, Movement-Driven Development: The Politics of Health and Democracy in Brazil, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. It can be purchased here. The book offers a mixed-methods analysis of civil society's influence on public health-related development outcomes throughout urban Brazil in recent decades. Using comparative-historical, fuzzy-set, and regression analysis, it examines how a social movement of public health activists (sanitaristas) known as the Sanitary Movement (Movimento Sanitário) transformed the constitutional right to health into improved social development outcomes during the last three decades years.  I look especially at the roles that sanitaristas and an ideologically wide spectrum of political parties played in building the local state structures required to broadly deliver basic public health and sanitation services in the country's largest and most unequal cities. This project draws on over two years of fieldwork in Brazil. 

Several sole-authored articles from this project - including work in Social Forces
​ (forthcoming), Sociology of Development (forthcoming), and Latin American Perspectives (2016) - explore related themes.

With a recently-awarded, $303,322 Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Science & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) tenable through 2020, I have begun work on a new, mixed methods project called State Development Projects and Social Inequality in Urban Brazil. The project examines relationships between state development projects, local politics, and changing social inequalities in urban Brazil during the last 15 years. In particular, it explores the conditions under which local politics can mediate global and national development processes in ways that weaken, rather than exacerbate social inequalities. 

Direct Democracy, Gender & Social Development 
in South India

Another piece of my research looks at the conditions under which direct democratic institutions can be effective in expanding social development outcomes in rural India. Through quantitative analyses of statistical data from the South Indian state of Kerala, this research traces expanded state provision of public housing and sanitiaton to women’s participation in a village-level, direct democratic institution called the gram sabha. Recently published in American Sociological Review (ASR), these inferential findings about the developmental contributions of women’s participation – and the absence of support for longstanding explanations – address sociological theories of development using new evidence from the world’s largest democracy.  Here is a link to the article, Making Redistributive Direct Democracy Matter: Development and Women's Participation in the Gram Sabhas of Kerala, India. 

• Here is a link to the dataset that I used in the article.
• Here are Freedom House's estimates of electoral democracies in 2010. 
• Here are UN populations estimates for these countries. 

 Politics of 
Social Development 
in Rural Indonesia

In qualitative, comparative work on Indonesia, my colleagues and I have addressed how women and historically marginalized ethnic groups have used a new set of direct democratic institutions to engage rural elites in the village-level politics of development projects. Findings from this collaborative research have appeared in publications including this article in the journal, Studies in Comparative International Development.