She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her substantive interests are in Comparative Politics—particularly elections, protest, and conflict in democracies—with an emphasis on quantitative and experimental methods. She has secured several grants from the National Science Foundation, including support from the NSF-funded Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. Her experimental research has been published in Electoral Studies, Politics and Gender, and Journal of Experimental Political Science. She has also published a monograph with Cambridge University Press, and research articles in Comparative Political Studies and International Organization.