I am a comparative political scientist studying how governments in developing countries (often under authoritarian rule) organize labor, distribute welfare and resources, conduct development reforms, organize citizen participation, and manage gender and social policies. My research examines how welfare provision and participatory reforms can expand access to state institutions while reinforcing political control. With an empirical focus on developing countries in Asia and post-communist Eurasia, I combine surveys, randomized experiments, archival research, content analysis, and fieldwork to explain when these policies increase citizens’ autonomy and when they strengthen state authority. My individual and collaborative research agendas raised $250,000 in research grants.

Coercive Distribution in Authoritarian Regimes 

In my first book and a related standalone paper, State Patriarchy: Forced Labor and the Making of Progressive Authoritarianism, I explain how authoritarian regimes build and use coercive public goods distribution to undermine existing social elites (what I call the household patriarchy) and extract labor, especially women’s labor. Even though the existence of welfare distribution in non-democratic world has been recorded in literature, their origins, operations and outcomes are under-investigated in empirical political science. This is especially true for a group of policies that can be called progressive, such as state-funded maternity wards, reproductive choice, nurseries, daycares, housing, and adult and children’s literacy schools. Building on my original archival research, fieldwork, statistical data, and content analysis, the book allows me to engage larger questions on the comparative political economy of development, especially on the coexistence of extractive and distributive systems, what I call the state patriarchy. I discussed my book project twice with the same university press editor for comparative politics as part of one-on-one meetings and implemented early recommendations. I am working on my first book workshop, where I will present my manuscript in three parts.

The first part of my book engages the origins of progressive authoritarian regimes. Turning to communist Eurasia, I find that the authoritarian regime based in Moscow chose restricted development path for all 40 Asian (all Muslim groups included), who were labeled as “culturally backward” due to lower pre-existing human and socioeconomic development as assessed by the communist authorities. Where soil conditions were right, the state mandated mass commodity agriculture, such as cotton and tobacco—an agricultural developmental path. State investments in technology were low. This required mass labor mobilization, including of women. In my original analysis of 12,000 communist party and government files (the entire body of elite files with over 20 million words), I find that the ideology followed politics. The state talked more about women in the context of labor and its economic goals.

In the second part, I explain the operations of progressive authoritarian regimes. I find that authoritarian regimes can radically commit to distribution to mobilize mass labor. This is especially so because such distribution helps both in underpaying for labor and undermining existing, non-state agricultural elites. To achieve this dual goal, the authoritarian state built and instrumentalized public goods system into labor mobilization. Through my original archival research from three countries, I introduce to the literature new communist state-owned enterprises that drove these goals. They invested in state presence and special programs to enable and protect rural labor, especially women’s labor. While this led to increased state presence through educational, healthcare, and welfare institutions, they focused on political goals and their quality was low.

In the third part, I study the outcomes of progressive authoritarian regimes based on my analysis of novel statistical data and primary district mayor assistant and household surveys from Uzbekistan, interviews with older adults from six countries, and secondary panel data at the household level. I leverage exogenous variation in the demand for forced labor due to soil suitability for labor-intensive crops, such as cotton and tobacco, to causally examine the effects of progressive authoritarianism. I find lower human and infrastructure development in more forced labor-intensive places, including lower number of women-owned small and middle-sized enterprises. However, I find that people who endured more forced labor participate in authoritarian state institutions more often and more deeply.

Using interviews with 190 older adults from Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, I illustrate how state-sponsored forced labor in agriculture used public goods providers, such as teachers and doctors, to mobilize labor, politicizing government services, and built a highly gendered system that was primarily supposed to muster workers. Depending on the crop type, some citizens missed up to four months of schooling every year. Men were preferred in leadership roles because the authorities did not believe that women could deliver on forced labor mobilization. Thus, public goods design, cadre recruitment, and their incentive mechanisms undermined their own quality by reinforcing political outcomes.

The Politics of Identity, Religion and Culture

In a separate research paper, “Does Secular Authoritarian Intervention in Religious Institutions Shape Gender Attitudes and Behavior?” (with Marika Olijar, under review), we find that authoritarian regimes can make cultural practices even more conservative through their interventions. Moreover, using our original dataset of all Islamic religious institutions in most of Central Asia and nearly 100 interviews, we find that institutional gender inclusivity is a greater predictor for better outcomes than institutional presence or official state policies.

In upcoming randomized experiments with completed pilots, Jennifer Murtazashvili, Dilnovoz Abdurazzakova and I are running two studies, using behavioral and attitudinal measures. In the first study, we examine preferences for customary governance in dispute resolution and distribution rights over common pool resources, such as water. In the second study, we investigate the costly tradeoff between remaining loyal to moral beliefs over international human rights and immediate economic pressures stemming from market price liberalization on utilities and environmental changes. Funded with $84,900 in research grant through the University of Pittsburgh, our pilot study employed tablet-assisted personal interviews among 203 farmers and broadly confirmed our theoretical expectations. The general study is scheduled for October 2026 and will involve 3,000 farmers in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Comparative Public Policy, Governance and Reforms

Since summer 2024, my coauthors and I completed four pre-registered randomized field experiments and three other pre-registered meta-studies with Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Labor and Poverty Reduction. We won $95,000 in research grant from the Korea Development Institute and organized our research work as the Local Economic and Administrative Performance (LEAP) Research Group. Using experimental and fieldwork research, we study policy priorities and their performance in postcommunist Central Asia among political elites, public service cadre and citizens. Together with Temirlan Moldogaziev (Indiana University Bloomington) and Cheol Liu (the Korea Development Institute School), we theorize that the period of elite transition and economic liberalization can create an opening for authoritarian governments to build popular legitimacy through participatory, anti-poverty and developmental policies. We test if authoritarian institutions that mimic populist participatory initiatives similar to Chinese may socialize their stakeholders to the idea of decentralization and participation in economic decision-making.

“Policy Entrepreneurship Under Extreme Uncertainty: Adoption and Implementation of Participatory Budgeting in “Thawing” Authoritarian Contexts,” forthcoming in the Policy Studies Journal in 2026, explains how elites can promote complex fiscal redistribution reforms for their own means and how they fall short without broad stakeholder engagement. Two more papers from this project are ready to be submitted: “Demand for Decentralization? Evidence from Elite Municipality Administrators in Uzbekistan” (to the Journal of Politics) and “How Technocrats Decide on Controversial Development Projects: Evidence from Uzbekistan” (to the World Development). In the former, we find that elite political administrators support decentralization where and when it can increase their power and decrease superiors’ oversight. In the latter, we find that elite political administrators in authoritarian countries are ready to face drops in their short-term rents by endorsing environmentally costly investments if that might help them with longer term tenure.

In additional working papers we are testing preferences for decentralization among citizens who critically view reforms as possible corruption instruments and if elite political administrators who are evaluated by citizens care about different channels of feedback that can be seen by their immediate superiors or the central government authority. Overall, we collected comprehensive survey data from over 7,000 public officials and 1,200 adults in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populous country and one of the fastest developing economies.