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 bureaucracy, corruption, and elite power-sharing under autocracy. I use computational social science techniques, such as scraping and natural language processing, to collect new and detailed evidence from countries across the former Soviet Union.

My doctoral work, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, studies the political determinants of bureaucrats’ behaviour in Kazakhstan. I ask questions like: How are bureaucrats chosen, and how do informal connections matter? What difference do informal connections make for how hard or competently bureaucrats work? Do elections make bureaucrats act differently, even if the election is neither free nor fair? How bureaucrats are appointed and managed is a core determinant of state capacity—but in autocratic regimes, bureaucratic loyalty can also underpin regime longevity. My thesis highlights the tension between central reforms, informal politics, and elite management amidst the Kazakhstan’s recent political upheavals.

I address these central issues using innovative data collection techniques and causal inference methods. For example, I collect otherwise unavailable information about thousands of Kazakhstan’s local bureaucrats by mining millions of contract PDFs. With these 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. Another paper uses a range of natural language processing techniques to derive novel measures of bureaucrat effort from traces of their everyday procurement tasks. These data help me tease out the link between personal connections and bureaucrats’ motivations. Or, in joint work with Kirill Melnikov and Eleonora Minaeva at the European University Institute, I use fine-grained procurement data alongside remote sensing (night light) evidence to study the effects of local elections. This work uses state-of-the-art staggered DiD methods to exploit the quasi-random roll-out of reforms in Kazakhstan’s village governments.

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.

At Oxford, I teach undergraduate papers (modules) in Comparative Government and Politics in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I was recently Visiting Scholar at the Department of Political Science and International Relations in Astana.