LINDSAY BENSTEAD

Lindsay J. Benstead is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and Director of the Middle East Studies Center (MESC) at Portland State University. Previously, she served as Fellow in the Middle East Program and the Women’s Global Leadership Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (2018-2019) and Kuwait Visiting Professor at SciencesPo in Paris (fall 2016). She is an Affiliated Scholar in the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg and Yale University. Benstead has conducted surveys in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Jordan and contributes to the Transitional Governance Project. Her research on women and politics, public opinion, and survey methodology has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Governance, and Foreign Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and served as a doctoral fellow at Yale University and a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. For more on her research, see https://pdx.academia.edu/LindsayBenstead.

MARGARET HANSON

Margaret Hanson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on law and legal institutions in autocracies, with an emphasis on the countries of the former Soviet Union. Her book manuscript, "Managing the Predatory State," analyzes how corruption shapes governance in personalist regimes. Other projects examine the design and co-optation of courts in emerging autocracies, the measurement and impact of judicial corruption, the institutionalization of the procuracy in the Soviet Union and China, human capital development in autocracies, and individuals' conceptualization of and support for democracy and autocracy. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Ohio State University, and served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 2017-2018. 

ALLISON HARTNETT

Allison Hartnett is a postdoctoral fellow in the Leitner Program on Political Economy at Yale University.  Her research examines how historical legacies impact long-term political outcomes in autocracies. Her book project examines how elite political opportunity structures formed under colonial rule condition demands for redistribution in the post-colonial Middle East and North Africa.  She is collecting data on parliamentarian and minister biographies to create a comprehensive data set of political elites in 18 MENA countries, with the goal of mapping trajectories of elite persistence and change from the 19th century until the present. 

LEE MORGENBESSER

Lee Morgenbesser is a senior lecturer with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University and a recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (2018–2020). His most recent book is Behind the Façade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) and he has a forthcoming book entitled The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). In addition to being a regular contributor to national and international media, some of his research has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, Political Studies and The Pacific Review. His research areas are authoritarian politics, dictators, democratization, and Southeast Asian politics.

BEN NOBLE

Ben Noble is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Russian Politics at University College London in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Ben's research focuses on the law-making process during the legislative stage of policy-making in authoritarian regimes, with an empirical focus on states of the former Soviet Union.  He has published work in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Legislative Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, and Post-Communist Economies. 

KEN OCHIENG' OPALO

Ken Opalo is an Assistant Professor in the School of Foreign Service. His research interests include legislative politics, subnational administration and local government, electoral politics, and the political economy of development in Africa. His first book, titled Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Post-Colonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores how the adaptation of inherited colonial legislative institutional forms and practices continue to structure and influence contemporary politics and policy outcomes in Africa. Ken’s current research projects include studies of the politics of service provision and accountability under devolved government in Kenya, education sector reforms in Tanzania, inter-state relations in Africa, and executive-legislative relations in Kenya. His works have been published in the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and Governance. He is a member of EGAP (Evidence in Governance and Politics), gui2de (Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation) and a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development. His research has been funded by the Luminate Group, the Susan Ford Dorsey Fellowship, and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). Ken earned his BA from Yale University and PhD from Stanford University.

PAUL SCHULER

Paul Schuler is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona. He has studied authoritarian legislatures, particularly the Vietnam National Assembly, for more than a decade. He has published research on this and other topics in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. He has also completed a book manuscript on the evolution of the Vietnam National Assembly, which is currently under consideration. 

EMILIA SIMISON

Emilia Simison is a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT. Her work focuses on authoritarian regimes and how their institutions shape the extent to which citizens and interest groups influence policy making. Her dissertation project examines the mechanisms through which changes in regime type affect policy to better understand how, and under which conditions, policy change takes place as a consequence of regime changes. She has articles, both published and under-review, on the internal operation and performance of authoritarian legislatures in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.​

MATTHEW WILSON

Matthew Wilson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina.  His research focuses on explaining the timing of autocratic institutions and their impacts on substantively important outcomes in comparative politics.  He recently published "Contested or established? A comparison of legislative powers across regimes" with Josef Woldense from the University of Minnesota in Democratization (2019, Volume 26, Issue 4), which provides a survey of the observed and expected powers of legislatures in democracies and non-democracies.  Together, Wilson and Woldense are collecting data on the background conditions that are associated with changes in the strength of legislatures, with the aim of developing generalizable theory about the factors that shape leaders' approaches to opposition in the legislature.

JOSEF WOLDENSE

Josef Woldense is an Assistant Professor in the African American & African Studies Department and an Affiliated Faculty in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University and B.A. in Political Studies from Bard College. His research interests are in the areas of elite politics, authoritarian regimes, political institutions and social network analysis with a geographical focus on Africa.