Kate is an assistant professor of political science, a faculty fellow at ISPS, a Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy fellow, and a research fellow at the Macmillan Center. She studies political accountability, state building and the politics of development, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her current research projects analyze politics in weak states. In these contexts, she is interested in how community-level institutions – such as traditional leaders and NGOs – interact with the national state to affect development, democracy and conflict. She uses a variety of methods in my research, including qualitative methods, survey research, historical analysis and experiments.