I am the Department Chair and Vail Pittman Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada Reno.

I work in the areas of religion and politics, and corruption, with a focus on the impact of institutions and beliefs on behavior, and malfeasance and the abuse of power within institutions. Those interests have led to a substantial new project on clergy child sex abuse in the Catholic church and sexual assault in the military. For instance, see my recent article with Jennet Kirkpatrick on care ethics and sexual assault, here. I have an ongoing collaborative project on the role of religion in conflict, and a project on culture and identity. My research approach is that of mixed methods, combining in various ways qualitative methods with quantitative analyses, and/or with field and lab experiments and focus groups. I am proficient in French and Italian.

I am the author of several books, Confessions of an Interest Group (Princeton 2000), The Best System Money Can Buy: Corruption in the European Union (Cornell 2007), (a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Title”), and Generating Generosity in Catholicism and Islam: Beliefs, Institutions and Public Goods Provision (Cambridge 2018), and a number of articles. Please see my Selected Publications page and my CV for further information on publications. For current projects, please see my New and Ongoing Projects page. For recent commentary, see my commentary page.

I have been a recipient of major grants from the US National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation/Science of Generosity Program, the Henry Luce Foundation, the US Army Research Institute, the US Office of Naval Research. I have been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, the Susan Louise Dryer National Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

In addition to being department Chair of the Political Science Department at UNR, I have had several other academic administration roles.  Previously I was a Professor at Arizona State University, where I was Faculty Head/Coordinator of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies, and an inaugural PLuS Alliance Fellow. The PLuS Alliance is an inter-university collaboration between the University of New South Wales, King’s College London, and ASU. I held a number of institutional affiliations at ASU, including with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at ASU, and the Center on the Future of War. I am a co-founder of ASU’s Gendered Violence Research Network and a member of the Association for Analytical Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies.

My B.A. is from the University of California San Diego, and my M.A. and Ph.D. are from Harvard University.

For my C.V., click here.