I am a Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and the Gillian Peele Fellow in Politics at Lady Margaret Hall. My research focuses primarily on the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes, in areas such as education, healthcare, infrastructure, and the environment. I also have a broad interest in questions related to electoral accountability, and in particular how it is affected by policy attribution. 

News

  • ​​My paper on Colonial Cotton Concessions, Customary Land Tenure, and Development in Mozambique, co-authored with Tugba Bozcaga and Arinze Nwokolo, has won the David Brian Robertson Prize of the APSA's Politics and History section. The prize recognises the best paper in politics and history presented at the 2025 APSA annual meeting. In the paper we demonstrate significant negative effects of the colonial cotton concession system on a range of present-day development outcomes, including various indicators of education, health, wealth, and access to public services such as electricity and water. We argue that the negative developmental effects of the cotton concessions result in part from the fact that the concession system encouraged more people onto individual plots of land, and that the subsequent increase in private land ownership undermined the ability of customary authority to facilitate development.
  • ​My new paper on Coups and Social Trust, co-authored with Thomas Brailey and Thomas Isbell, was recently included in the Afrobarometer working paper series. We make use of a natural experiment in Burkina Faso, as well as cross-national survey data, to study the effects of coups on social trust. 

Recent work