I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. I am a (largely) empirical political scientist working at the intersection of International Relations and Comparative Politics. My research seeks to understand the causes of political order, the evolution of the international system, and the origins of the set of institutions identified with the modern territorial state. A second line of work explores the origins and impact of institutional constraints on executives, highlighting the endogeneity of institutional choices and the centrality of non-institutional factors (e.g., primitives like power, interests, identities, and ideas) in political and economic development. I am currently working on a series of papers that advance tools for preference elicitation in political science.
You can contact me at sabramso@ur.rochester.edu