Thomas J. Brailey
PhD Candidate (Nuffield College, University of Oxford)
Welcome! I am a PhD student in Politics at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. I study the provision of security by state and non-state actors in Sub-Saharan Africa. My dissertation probes under what circumstances states accept, co-opt, or suppress non-state security providers. My research interests include the political economy of development, political violence, and research transparency and reproducibility.
I received my MPhil in Comparative Government (with distinction) from the University of Oxford in 2024. I received a Bachelor of Science in political science and data analytics (summa cum laude) from UC San Diego in 2020.
From 2020 to 2022, I served as a pre-doctoral fellow with J-PAL’s Payments and Governance Research Program. I have also served as a research assistant for the Center for the Study of African Political Economy and as a lab assistant for the Center for Peace and Security Studies.
I am currently completing a placement with IOM Kenya’s Data Unit.
Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa
- Coups and Social Trust: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Burkina Faso. (With Robin Harding and Thomas Isbell). Under review.
Non-Sate Security
- The Centralization of Security and Citizen Safety: Evidence from Mozambique.
- Conceptualizing Non-State Security. Conditionally accepted at Conflict Management and Peace Science.
- How the State Legitimizes Non-State Security Provision.
Meta-Science
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Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research (5th author by contribution, with Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, Nikolai Cook, et al.). Nature.
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Tracing Dataset Usage in Political Science.
I4R Replication Reports
- Reproduction and Robustness of Kao et al.(2024): “Female Representation and Legitimacy”. A Report from the 2024 UC Berkeley Replication Games. (With Edmund Kelly, Angela Odermatt, and Albert Ward).
- Why Do Citizens Tolerate Undemocratic Behaviour? A Comment on Frederiksen (2022). (With Matthew Hepplewhite and Scott Moser).
- A Robustness Reproduction of Tappin, Berinsky and Rand (2023): “Partisans’ Receptivity to Persuasive Messaging is Undiminished by Countervailing Party Leader Cues”. (with Edmund Kelly).
Other Publications
- Dataset: Building a Comprehensive Database on Conflict: Ethiopia, 1997–2017.
- BITSS Blog Post: Ensuring Reproducibility in Large Research Teams (2022).
Works in Progress
- Rethinking Public Goods Provision: Functional Specialization and Security in Displacement Settings (with Pilar Sanchez-Bellosta).
- Security Responses to Gender-Based Violence in Conflict: Evidence from IDP Camps in Nigeria (with Pilar Sanchez-Bellosta).
- The Historical Persistence of Colonial Security: Evidence from Namibia.
- Public Preferences for Security Provision in South Africa.