He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1996, and was a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Chile. His research interests include executive-legislative relations, electoral systems, local government, and decentralization in Latin America. He is the author of The President and Congress in Post-authoritarian Chile: Institutional Constraints to Democratic Consolidation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), and numerous articles on electoral and party politics in Chile. His current work focuses on political recruitment in the Americas.