Daniel Hadi is an Economics and Art History double major from Portland, Oregon, completing an interdisciplinary honors thesis with CDDRL for the 2026–2027 academic year. His research bridges microeconomic evaluation with questions of institutional design, governance, and the politics of place-based development. Daniel has conducted research at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and the Hoover Institution. He is a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholar who studied Arabic in Oman. After Stanford, he hopes to pursue development economics focused on cultural preservation and entrepreneurship in low- and middle-income countries.

Anusha Nadkarni is a B.A./M.A. student in Public Policy ('27) focusing on Development and Growth Policies. She is also a double minor in Global Studies and Human Rights, with a particular focus on issues related to South Asia, gender-based violence, international human rights law, and comparative democratic development. Her prior experience working as a nonprofit leader in student-led antiracist education implementation informs her restorative, culturally responsive, and empirically-informed approach to international equity issues.

Anusha's past engagement with these interests includes spending a summer working in Mumbai's courts, an internship analyzing development bank violations of human rights at the Accountability Counsel, and a Student Fellowship with the Huntington Program for Strengthening U.S.-India Relations at the Hoover Institution. In her personal life, Anusha loves to hike, spend time with her loved ones (including a very cute cat), and play the guitar.

Adam is a Researcher at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His research focuses on democracy and conflict in divided societies, particularly in the Horn of Africa, South Asia, the Levant, and the United States. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC San Diego and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. 

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. As of fall 2024, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

I was educated at the University of California, 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. Most recently, I am a recipient of the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Data Set Award for the Global Legislator Database. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), and the International Growth Center (ICG).

I am currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national study of why reelection rates of national legislators rise with economic development. The book manuscript in preparation is provisionally entitled Capacity Gap: Electoral Failure in Weak States. A first publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared in 2023 as "The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World" in Cambridge University Press' Elements in Political Economy series. My book prior to that was Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017), written with economist Raymond Fisman.

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.