I consider my research and teaching as complementary halves of my work to advance a better understanding of important political questions by identifying generalizable patterns within or across nations. Specifically, my research focuses on how politics is conducted in authoritarian societies comparatively, and contextually.  For these projects, I use various methodological approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, while remaining committed to the principles of parsimony, falsifiability, and clarity to produce scholarship that is replicable, falsifiable, and reliable.

The research that I began during my doctoral work was inspired by the Iranian Green movement of 2009 when I noticed patterns of contentious political mobilization that seemed similar to prior incidents. As I sought to discover whether patterns of contentious collective actions are knowable and therefore generalizable or must be studied as separate events, I identified major gaps in the literature on contentious political actions in authoritarian societies. First, the existing literature primarily focused on instances of collective action and was unable to explain periods of no action immediately prior. Second, the theories and models were generally post-hoc and only worked for retroactive prediction; most theories and models have little to no predictive utility. This weakness in the literature was often ignored given the limited number of successful instances of collective actions in authoritarian societies with minimal contextual differences. I found that Iran presented an ideal case study in how best to close this gap, given multiple instances of contentious collective actions with minimal contextual difference from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, Islamic Revolution of 1979, to the Green movement of 2009 allowing a longitudinal case study across time. Thus, my contribution to the literature has been to offer a theory that explains not only major incidents of contentious mobilization but also periods of no major contentious collective actions. Backed by 120 years of historical and media content data analyses, my model has much greater predictive value.

Concurrently, I am working on other projects related to my current research on social and political movements in Egypt and Tunisia. One article in progress examines the data extracted via API connection from the “We are all Khalid Said” Facebook page, which is widely known as the primary catalyst for the Egyptian revolution. Beyond anecdotal evidence from those on the ground at the time, this data provides one of the rarest and most objective sources on the effects of framing in mobilizing actions. Another article “Relational Goods and Participation in a Revolt: An Approach to Understanding the Arab Spring and the Role of Social Media,” presented at MPSA conference, focuses on relational goods as a variable that can explain the process driving several stages of development toward a social movement.  Using a quantitative analysis of the second wave of the Arab Barometer dataset, my co-author Carole J. Uhlaner and I contend that relational goods are the motive force and thus a basis for a better account of the part played by digital and physical social networks in the Arab Spring.  I intend to continue studying the contentious politics in the Middle East using widely available tools such as the World Value Survey dataset, Arab Barometer, media content, and social media node analyses.  

Finally, an important component of my research is mentoring students. I strive to teach them the value of engaged and informed research employing applied mixed methodological research designs and interdisciplinary scholarship addressing major social and political phenomena to guide students into praxis.