I am a DPhil (PhD) candidate in politics at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. My work, supervised by Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya, investigates the political economy of bureaucracies, subnational governance, and elite power-sharing in Central Asia.

My research utilises computational social science techniques, including scraping and machine learning, to collect detailed evidence on public administration in Kazakhstan. With this data, I present evidence on how bureaucrats and elites come to hold power, how they use it, and how their actions shape their political futures. My doctoral work helps to reveal the drivers of favouritism in the bureaucracy, how connections between civil service managers and their subordinates shape service delivery, and how central authorities keep senior government elites loyal. This work is funded by a four-year Economic and Social Research Council studentship awarded by the Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme.

Current projects

My doctoral work, three papers on bureaucrat selection, investigates personnel politics in Kazakhstan. How bureaucrats are appointed and managed is a core determinant of state capacity. My thesis highlights the tension between central reforms, informal politics, and elite management amidst the country’s biggest political upheaval in some time. I manually collect a dataset of district bureaucrat tenures and link it to new, extensive data on over 7,000 appointments of their senior subordinates as well as payroll data on their junior colleagues.

In the first paper, I use my data to study the drivers of biased hiring. I argue that, under weak rule of law, bureaucratic managers balance the potential rewards of hiring aligned subordinates—which allows them to solve delegation problems—with the risk of punishment for breaching civil service regulations. With my data, I provide systematic evidence of biased hiring of senior subordinates but not of junior staff, demonstrating how informal politics sustain biased hiring despite civil service reforms. In the second paper, I employ evidence from millions of public procurement contracts to show how connections between district bureaucrats and their subordinates shapes service delivery. I show that bureaucrats aligned with subordinates are responsible for managing more and larger procurement projects. In the third paper, finally, I study how authorities control subnational delegation. Who do national elites share power with? How do they judge their subordinates’ abilities? I collect biographic data on regional governors to show how Kazakhstan’s regime has manipulated their careers to build loyalty to the centre.

Beyond the thesis, with Kirill Melnikov and Eleonora Minaeva at the European University Institute, I am working on a project examining the impact of introducing local elections on the make-up of Kazakhstan’s local elites. In related work, we exploit the quasi-random implementation of this reform to study its effects on local public procurement.

I am currently a research assistant on Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya’s ESRC funded project on non-violent repression. Previously, I worked as a research assistant on the UKRI/Horizon Europe-funded AUTHLIB project, Professor Lenka Buštíková’s work on illiberalism in Ukraine, and the Oxford University Economic Recovery Project at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Other work

Outside of academia, I have experience providing open source methods and Russian-language consulting for research and analysis projects related to the former Soviet Union. Please contact me to discuss my availability.