Ali Ahmed is a PhD candidate at the Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU. He studies comparative politics and historical political economy. His research focuses on inequality, inclusive institutions, and the politics of democratic capture in Europe and Latin America. Ali’s dissertation project explores the consequences of historical inequalities for politics and society following democratic transitions. He combines extensive archival research with quantitative methods and spatial analysis to examine how inequality interacts with institutional reforms to determine the level of local redistribution and long-run development. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review.
Ali completed a Master's degree in comparative politics and development at Tufts University, and received a Bachelor's of Arts (A.B.) in Economics from Harvard University. During the 2019-2020 academic year, he received the NYU-AD Dissertation Writing Fellowship. He is currently a PhD Research Fellow at NYU-Abu Dhabi.
