Political parties, elections, and voting behavior; Mexican politics; Latin American politics; research methods; comparative democratization.

I am currently Principal Investigator on the Mexico 2012 Panel Study, a project designed to learn more about Mexican voters' attitudes and choices during the upcoming presidential campaigns. A central component of the project concerns vote-buying.

I am also working on a project that compares party systems across new democracies, paying particular attention to variations in the degree of party system stability (i.e., places like Chile vs. places like Peru).

Previously, I wrote a book called Why Dominant Parties Lose that explained why some political parties can remain in power for decades and why, by the end of the 20th century, nearly all dominant parties around the world had lost power.