About

Education

University of Konstanz

M.Sc. Social and Economic Data Science (expected 2025)

Master’s thesis (prospective): “Sharpened Pencils: New parties and old elites after democratic transition”

Yale University

B.A. Political Science (2023)

Bachelor’s thesis: “Contact and Competition: How refugees and labor markets mediate far-right voting in Austria”

Conference Presentations

Broken Parachutes: Why local copartisans don’t buy votes for their party

RSA Central and Eastern Europe Conference 2024 (Dubrovnik, Croatia)

This paper examines the impact of privileged access to state resources on electoral outcomes in Poland. Past work has found that, when national parties target state resource to copartisan local officials with the aim of buying votes, the electoral payoffs for the national party are meager or nonexistent. I propose that electoral competition for local office can help explain this effect. While other authors have shown that competition influences parties’ choice of non-programmatic distribution strategy, I aim to reframe competition as an endogenous feature. More specifically, I posit that conditional access to state resources loosens competition constraints at the local level by reducing the number of candidates who enter elections. In turn, I argue that access to state resources reduces incumbents’ incentive to invest in targeted local distribution, accounting for limited electoral returns to the national party. Using data on Polish municipal finance and voting behavior in the period between 2013 and 2020, I am able to replicate the positive effect of PiS copartisanship on receiving transfers in a novel setting, identify a negative effect of transfers on candidate entry in local elections, and demonstrate the failure of state resources to win political support.