Team

Marc S. Jacob

Assistant Professor of Democracy and Global Affairs, Keough School of Global Affairs, with a concurrent appointment in the Department of Political Science and core affiliate faculty at the Kellogg Institute.

Jacob studies political behavior, public opinion and institutional change, and how citizens respond to democratization and democratic backsliding. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich and was a postdoctoral scholar with the Polarization Research Lab at Stanford University.

Faculty page · Personal website

Selected work related to this project

• Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy. American Journal of Political Science.
• The demand side of democratic backsliding: how divergent understandings of democracy shape political choice. British Journal of Political Science.
• Citizen support for democracy, anti-pluralist parties in power and democratic backsliding. European Journal of Political Research.

Tiffany M. Tang

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor, Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics.

Tang develops interpretable statistical machine learning methods for extracting reliable insights from real-world data, and builds open-source tools that make those methods usable in practice. In this project she leads the estimation of treatment effect heterogeneity. She holds a PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley and a BA and BS from Rice University.

Faculty page · Personal website

Selected work related to this project

• Huang, M., Tang, T. M. and Kenney, A. M. Distilling heterogeneous treatment effects: stable subgroup estimation in causal inference. The method used for the exploratory heterogeneity analysis in this project.
• Work in the Annals of Applied Statistics, the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the Journal of Open Source Software.

Thomas Mustillo

Associate Professor of Global Affairs, Keough School of Global Affairs, Director of the Governance and Policy major, and a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2018.

Mustillo works on democratic representation, party politics, governance and quantitative methods, with a focus on Latin America and on highly unstable electoral contexts. His current work examines forms of volatility and spatial variation in support for political parties. He co-edits the Political Data Yearbook of the European Journal of Political Research.

Faculty page

Selected work related to this project

• Floating voters and the rise of new left parties: electoral volatility during party system transformation. Latin American Politics and Society.
• Measures and votes: party performance under free list proportional representation, with evidence from Ecuador, with John Polga-Hecimovich.
• The logic of ambitious legislators in fluid party systems. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2025.

Adriana Pilar Ferreira Albanus

PhD student in political science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in comparative politics and methods, and a PhD student in political science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, specializing in political culture.

Her dissertation at UFRGS examines the relationship between presidential rhetoric and public opinion in Brazil and the United States. She has been a research assistant at World Values Survey Brazil since 2016 and was a research visitor at the Kellogg Institute in 2020 and 2021.

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Katy Farr

PhD student in political science at the University of Notre Dame, studying American politics and political theory.

Her research interests are fascism, authoritarianism, gender and democracy. She holds a BA in political science and history from Guilford College.

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Carly Sandstrom

PhD student in political science at the University of Notre Dame and a Kellogg Institute PhD Fellow.

Her research interests include conflict and political violence, gender-based violence, children’s rights, human rights and democracy. She holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MA in human rights studies from Columbia University.

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