Khushmita Dhabhai is a Research Assistant at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Currently pursuing studies in Political Science and Data Science, her academic interests span civil and interstate wars, ethnic conflict, and democratic accountability. Khushmita is also deeply interested in questions of governance and the dynamics of decision-making during instances of violence. 

Between 2019 and 2024, I held the Peter Mair Chair of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. Prior to my 2019 move to the EUI, I taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. During 2024-25, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

I was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  My research is in the area of political economy. I have conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa.  My work has been honored with the Jewell-Loewenberg Prize, the Lawrence Longley Award, the Gregory A. Leubbert Book Award (runner-up), a Choice Award, and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), UK's Department for International Development (DfID), and the International Growth Center (ICG).

I am currently engaged in a large-scale study of how and when politicians secure reelection. A first publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared as The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World in 2023 in Cambridge University Press' Elements in Political Economy series. My most recent book prior to that was Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017), written with economist Raymond Fisman. My current field-based research concerns political responsiveness in Pakistan, on which I have an on-going collaboration with Saad Gulzar. Finally, with Alex Scacco and subsequently Tara Slough, I co-chaired the COVID-19 Model Challenges project.

At the EUI, I taught two graduate seminars annually. The core course in comparative politics (team-taught with Simon Hix) introduces students to topics in the subfield. The Practicum in Reproducible Research Methods walks students through all the steps involved in a complex collaborative reproducible research project and provides instruction in the skills required to successfully execute modern social scientific research.

I am an Associate Member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I have been a Visiting Senior Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. I am an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) of the University of California at Berkeley, a Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and an active member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). I am an invited researcher to J-PAL's Governance Initiative. Long a proponent of research transparency and replicability, I am a BITSS Catalyst with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences and have assembled multiple data sets that are available in the public domain on Dataverse.​

A recent interview with me is available at Scientia Futura. 

Mona Tajali is a scholar of gender and politics, specializing in women's political participation and representation in Muslim countries, with a comparative focus on Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Her research includes analysis of feminist mobilization against patriarchal structures as well as the experiences of institutionalization of women's rights in semi-democratic and non-democratic contexts. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (2022) and co-author of Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (2011), both published as open access. She is also the co-editor of Women and Constitutions in Muslim Contexts (2024), the first compilation analyzing several national constitutions of the Muslim world through a gender lens.

A firm believer in engaging across the academic-practitioner divide, Tajali has been a long-term collaborator with transnational solidarity network and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), and, since 2019, has served as a member of its executive board. She is published in both academic and popular outlets, among them the Middle East Journal, Politics & Gender, The Conversation, and The Washington Post. Tajali is a former associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra is a Ph.D candidate in political science at the University of Rochester with a broad interest in empirical political economy. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the American Journal of Political Science and The Quarterly Journal of Political Science. He uses a wide range of quantitative methods to study the judiciary, women in politics, political institutions, and bureaucracies with a focus on South Asia.

Feyaad Allie is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University focusing on comparative politics. Feyaad’s dissertation project examines the sustained exclusion of marginalized groups in multi-ethnic democracies with a focus on Muslims in India. In other ongoing research, he focuses on majority-minority relations, the intersection of technology and politics, and migration. To study these topics, Feyaad takes a mixed-methods approach, leveraging administrative data, original surveys, archival materials, in-depth interviews, and participant observation. Regionally, most of Feyaad’s work is focused on South Asia, primarily India.

Feyaad is a graduate fellow with Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab and affiliated with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. He is also a 2017 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a Stanford EDGE Doctoral Fellow, and an APSA Minority Fellow. Prior to graduate school, Feyaad worked on an international development project in Nairobi, Kenya. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in Government from Dartmouth College.