I am a political scientist who studies multiracial democracy. Democracy, at its core, is shared rule by the people. In a multiracial political order, that commitment requires power to be shared across racial difference. My research focuses on the dimensions of democracy through which shared rule is realized: secure and equal membership, effective political power, and durable protection from coercive domination across groups. I ask what those commitments require in practice and why, after nearly 250 years of democratic development, the United States has not consolidated a multiracial democracy.

My book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Exclusion, and the American Political Order, answers this puzzle by arguing that the United States developed as a herrenvolk democracy—a political order that extended meaningful democratic rule within a dominant racial group while preserving inequalities in membership, power, and protection across groups. Tracing American political development from the colonial period to the present, the book shows how institutional choices, including those made by courts, repeatedly foreclosed openings for multiracial democracy.

Alongside the book, I am developing the Power-Sharing Index to measure whether political power, civil standing, and protection from coercive domination are shared across groups. My related article, “Democracy for Whom? Herrenvolk Democracy and the American Founding ,” was published in PS: Political Science & Politics for the 250th anniversary of 1776.

I am currently the Guinier Project Postdoctoral Fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School. My work there examines the institutional foundations of multiracial democracy, including how electoral institutions structure political power across racial groups and how their effects vary across legal, demographic, and political contexts. This research connects scholarship on democratic quality and racial political behavior to the development and evaluation of democratic reform. Across my projects, I use historical analysis, survey research, measurement, machine learning, and comparative institutional analysis.

Background

I was born and raised on Tucson’s South Side and began my college education at Pima Community College. From there, I transferred to the University of Arizona, where I earned my BA in Government and Public Policy, magna cum laude, and received the Robie Gold Medal. I later earned my PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Before joining the Houston Institute, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.