Immigration and Far-Right Government Support

How do citizens evaluate far-right governments in office? I conduct a survey experiment to study how immigration affects the support for a far-right government. The experiment, embedded in a representative survey of 2055 individuals in Italy, exposes different respondent groups to information regarding the government’s pledges and outcomes in immigration and economic growth. Drawing upon the literature, I find evidence that under the far right in office, citizens react negatively to non-attainment of pledged immigration outcomes. No heterogeneous treatment effects w.r.t. political views are evident, as the effect is neither more nor less pronounced among those who consider immigration important, people with left, right or far-right attitudes and among far-right party voters. By examining the dynamics between policy pledges, outcomes, and voter responses, this research sheds light on the evaluation of far-right governments by the electorate.

Presented at Bocconi University and NYU's Rebecca Morton Conference on Experimental Political Science.

Draft available and citeable as a part my 2025 PhD dissertation.

Shifting Ground: The 2023 Earthquake and Electoral Accountability in Turkey

Do calamities of nature erode support for authoritarian governments? I argue that disasters provide a rare test of authoritarian competence, as their visibility and urgency make them difficult to censor or spin, revealing regime capacity in the eyes of citizens and opening the way for electoral accountability. I show this by studying the political aftermath of the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, where general elections followed just three months later. Combining georeferenced earthquake data with building damage records and electoral returns from 45,000 localities, I use a difference-in-differences design with matching on pre-treatment outcomes to estimate the effect of disaster exposure on support for the ruling AKP and voter turnout. I further separate the effect of ground shaking from that of residualized building damage, which captures variation in preparedness and construction enforcement. The results show a drop in support for AKP in affected areas in 2023, with the effect concentrated where damage exceeded what shaking alone would predict, and largely dissipating by the 2024 elections. The findings suggest that even in authoritarian regimes, disasters can trigger electoral costs.

Presented at Bocconi University, LSE, APSA, EPSA and SPSA conferences.

Draft in progress.

Detecting AI-Generated Responses in Outsourced Survey Data Collection 

(co-authored with Georgy Tarasenko and Andrei Tkachenko) 

Researchers who outsource survey fieldwork to third-party vendors cede oversight over the collection process. We present evidence that this practice is vulnerable to AI-generated responses from vendors. Analyzing an online survey of Russian residents in 2026, we detect a sharp discontinuity in data quality as the fieldwork deadline approached. Several independent indicators, spanning open-text characteristics, completion-time distributions, geographic-location clustering, and closed-ended response distributions, shift simultaneously during the affected period. The patterns are consistent with the vendor's batch AI-generated survey responses and are difficult to reconcile with scattered respondent-level use of AI. While the current literature on AI contamination in surveys focuses on respondent-side threats on established Western platforms, our case highlights a risk that data providers within an outsourced data collection pipeline use AI to fabricate responses. 

Draft in progress.