Research

My research focuses on political representation from a comparative and global perspective. This places my body of work at the nexus of international relations, comparative politics, and political theory. I am currently approaching the topic of representation through three ongoing projects:

(1) My first project examines the politics of representation at the global level through the development of ‘alternative representative organizations,’ specifically the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). Alternative representation organizations like the UNPO are forums for people(s) who lack substantive and descriptive representation in the states they live in or originate from to lobby regional and intergovernmental organizations who may be able to influence state behavior. The UNPO is especially active in helping member delegations participate in human rights monitoring mechanisms like the Universal Periodic Review Process, with the UNPO’s recommendations influencing final reports and recommendations from these processes.

I make two major arguments across this project: first, that many people cannot be discursively represented domestically and/or internationally – that they have no space in which to ‘appear’ and thus occupy a liminal status with respect to particular regimes of recognition. Second, that international law and global governance oriented predominantly around states renders certain forms of recognition a predominantly political, rather than legal process. In particular, I focus on the concept of peoplehood.

Currently, I am transitioning this project into a series of articles.

(2) My interest in political representation extends to how representative institutions – even imperfect ones – can be disrupted through military interventions in politics. I am co-manager of the Coup Agency and Mechanism (CAM) project which includes event-level data on military coups and, especially, coup plotters. Specifically, we focus on the importance of individual characteristics of coup plotters, including what level of the military they come from (elite versus combat officers), and what kinds of political promises they make to potential constituencies when perpetrating coups (manuscript under review). To date, this data has been used in several projects. This includes a coauthored piece in International Studies Quarterly (Albrecht, Köhler, and Schutz 2021) which finds that combat officer coups are more likely than elite officer coups to lead to democratization and a note in the APSA Comparative Politics Newsletter that suggests how scholars of military coups can consider the interaction of coups and civilian politics (Albrecht, Köhler, and Schutz 2023). These data have been used in other published articles, which can be found on our website (militarycoups.org).

(3) An additional project with Doug Gibler, Dennis Foster, and Leah Windsor examines the influence of the descriptive representation of women in the British House of Commons over time on interstate crisis behavior (under review).

How do I grad school?

I ran a youtube series entitled “how do I grad school?” with the primary objective of helping first semester graduate students. This project was motivated by the reduction of professionalization and skill development opportunities due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. You can find this series on my YouTube page, and announcements and threads about new videos on my Bluesky. I have also archived unrolled versions of threads which were originally on my twitter account (deleted) here. I intend to pivot this channel into discussing academic skills for undergraduate political science students and anticipate a relaunch in Summer, 2025.