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Political authenticity is connected to higher levels of political trust from electorates and can influence political outcomes, but it is often overlooked as a relevant factor for electoral behavior. To date, discussions of how authenticity appears and changes in politics typically remain at the theoretical level and are rarely comparative. This article develops a framework to identify and compare how authenticity is performed in political discourses over time and across settings by politicians. To demonstrate the usefulness of the framework, this article investigates authenticity performances in 21,496 political texts of electoral debates, interviews, campaigns, and official speeches by presidents and presidential candidates in Brazil and the United States (US) since 1988. The findings indicate that authenticity is generally performed with greater frequency by presidents and presidential candidates in Brazil than in the US, though authenticity performances are not more prevalent during election years in either country.
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This article investigates how the Amazon has been constructed as a problem in Brazilian presidential speeches since 1985. We develop a framework that accounts for how important transnational actors, as presidents, construct policy objects as particular problems depending on where and when they participate in politics. We create a dataset containing 6240 official speeches by all Brazilian presidents since 1985. We train a supervised machine learning algorithim to classify how Amazon related sections within speeches construct the Amazon as a problem. We find that presidents often construct the Amazon as an environmental problem when speaking far away from the region, whereas they usually construct it as problems of economic integration or social development when in the Amazon.
Awarded Best Paper in Amazonian Studies at the Latin American Studies Association
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Public Acceptance of Environmental Restrictions beyond High-Income Democracies (with Stefano Jud and Quynh Nguyen) - Revise and Resubmit at Environmental Research Letters
Environmental policies that effectively address pollution and climate change often come with restrictions on individual behavior and economic activity. Understanding public acceptance of such policies is therefore critical for environmental governance, particularly in political contexts beyond the high-income democracies that dominate existing research. This study examines how citizens in less democratic political systems evaluate restrictive environmental policies and which policy attributes shape their support. We conducted a large-scale conjoint experiment with 17,793 respondents across 12 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America where respondents were tasked to evaluate environmental policy proposals that differ in effectiveness, restrictiveness, individual and societal costs, and opportunities for citizen participation. The results show that acceptance of restrictive environmental policies is structured by a multidimensional evaluative logic. Across countries, citizens weigh policy effectiveness alongside personal and societal costs and procedural inclusion when forming policy preferences. Policies perceived as more effective, less economically burdensome, especially at the household level, and more inclusive receive higher levels of support, are viewed as fairer, and elicit greater willingness to comply. These findings contribute new evidence to debates on environmental governance and political legitimacy in less democratic regimes.
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How urgent are your priorities? Comparing political priorities in discourse (with Jael Tan and James Hollway) - Revise and Resubmit at the European Journal of Political Research
How can we tell which problems or policies political leaders consider urgent? While politicians regularly signal urgency to their audiences when speaking to their electorates or canvassing support, existing computational methods for analyzing text at scale were developed to identify topic frequency or discursive tone, and not which actions the speaker claims to prioritize. We introduce a new text analytic tool, urgency analysis, that combines natural language processing and survey validated dictionaries to provide an interpretable measure of the urgency of priorities in political texts. To demonstrate the usefulness of urgency analysis, we compare the urgency of climate change priorities by speaker and over time. Using data on United States presidential and United Kingdom prime ministerial political speeches between 2009 and 2019, we find that climate change appears less urgent over time in political discourses, especially when compared to employment, immigration, and health. We conclude by discussing extensions to urgency analysis and its potential applications. Urgency analysis is implemented for R with the poldis package, making it an easy, free, and accessible tool for researchers interested in analyzing political discourses.
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Gender and Climate Change Attitudes: A reappraisal of Bush and Clayton 2023 using new survey evidence (with Stefano Jud and Quynh Nguyen) - Under review at the American Political Science Review
How do men and women differ in their climate change attitudes? In “Facing Change: Gender and Climate Change Attitudes Worldwide”, Bush and Clayton show that women become more concerned about climate change than men as countries grow wealthier. We reassess this influential finding using two new cross-national datasets: (i) an original online survey of 17,793 respondents across 12 hybrid and authoritarian regimes fielded in 2025, and (ii) a 20-country survey by Dechezleprêtre et al. (2025). We first replicate the published estimates using the authors’ original data. However, applying the same models to the new surveys, we find no systematic association between economic development and gender differences in climate attitudes. We further show that the original results are sensitive to sample composition and country inclusion rules. While Bush and Clayton’s study provides valuable insights into gender gaps in climate attitudes, we conclude that future research should more clearly specify scope conditions.
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Does democratic backsliding defund the liberal world order? The case of the United Nations (with Livio Silva-Muller)
Existing research suggests that backsliding democracies adjust their rhetoric and adopt strategic maneuvers to stall the diffusion of liberal norms within, and outside of, international organizations (IOs). Yet, we know little about whether these governments reduce their financial support to IOs - beyond the anecdotal case of Trump’s recent defunding. This article examines whether and how democratic backsliding affects the funding of IOs. We, first, employ a mixed-effects model leveraging a dataset covering over 30’000 member-states’ donations to 65 UN organizations from 2013 to 2024. We find no effect of different types of backsliding on financial contributions to IOs, even when accounting for organizations’ mandates and memberships. Second, we conduct a comparative case-study of Brazil and the United States (US) showing that both the Trump (2017-2020) and Bolsonaro (2019-2023) administrations restructured funding to IOs in selective ways: while the US reduced voluntary contributions to normative agencies, such as UN Women, Brazil redirected funds toward technical organizations. Our results suggest that backsliding governments do not necessarily disengage from the international system, rather they recalibrate their financial commitments in selective, but consequential, ways.
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Armed Conflict and land-use dynamics: A global comparative analysis (with Remo Agovic, Stefano Jud, and Quynh Nguyen)
Most conflicts of the past half-century occurred in biodiversity hotspots, yet the consequences of warfare for land-use dynamics remain poorly understood. Whereas violent conflicts can accelerate deforestation and agricultural expansion through institutional breakdown and population displacement, they can also have positive effects on conservation by disrupting mobility, markets, and settlements. These opposing mechanisms make the overall relationship between conflict and land use theoretically ambiguous and empirically inconsistent. To address this gap, we investigate how, and under what conditions, conflict influences land-use patterns in 32 countries that experienced conflicts from 2000 to 2022. We rely on a high-resolution, 30 by 30 square meters, global landcover time-series dataset and a georeferenced conflict events dataset to extract land uses around conflict events’ locations. Employing a quasi-experimental, staggered difference-in-differences, design, we estimate the effects of conflict on land-use change over time. We find that land use is highly responsive to conflict: shifts from native vegetation to agricultural land consistently take place 15 to 30 kilometers away from conflict locations. A better understanding of these dynamics is crucial to prevent that environmental degradation becomes a durable legacy of war.
\[\\[0.1cm]\] Stay off the target: Public support for targeted climate policies in less democratic contexts (with Stefano Jud and Quynh Nguyen)
Climate justice frameworks emphasize that climate mitigation policies should assign burdens according to capacity and responsibility. While the principle underlies international climate agreements and domestic legislation, citizens’ support for targeted policies remains contested — especially in less democratic countries that include many of the world’s largest emitters, rapidly urbanizing nations, and climate-vulnerable populations. Through original conjoint survey experiments with more than 17,000 respondents across 12 hybrid and authoritarian regimes, this article investigates support for climate policies that differentially assign burdens. We find that targeted policies that impose costs only on the rich or urban residents reduce, rather than enhance, public support. This raises difficult questions for the politics of just transitions: normatively equitable policies may be unsustainable without public support. We argue that this tension reflects broader procedural concerns with free-riding, favoritism, and enforceability and explore individual-level explanations (e.g., environmental concern) and country-level contexts (e.g., regime type) to understand the mechanisms behind these preferences.
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Managing imprecise dates in R with messydates (with James Hollway)
Dates are often messy. Whether historical (or ancient), future, or even recent, we sometimes only know approximately when an event occurred, that it happened within a particular period, or sources offer multiple competing dates. Although researchers generally recognize this messiness, many feel expected to force artificial precision or unfortunate imprecision on temporal data to proceed with analysis. However, this can create inferential issues when timing or sequence is important. This paper introduces the messydates R package that assists researchers with this problem by retaining and working with various kinds of date imprecision.
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