UNSW Business School &
UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice
UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice
UNSW Sydney 2052, NSW
PEOPLE
Directors
I am a Professor at the UNSW Business School, an ARC Future Fellow, and a CEPR Research Fellow.
I am a political economist. My research aims at understanding the determinants of democratic stability and provide insights into what economic, technological, and political factors increase the viability of liberal democratic institutions in the long run. I focus on the role of the state bureaucracy and its relation with politics and citizens, and the management and transmission of information in a context of increasing media pluralism. I wish to contribute to the design of democratic institutions capable to withstand negative economic and social shocks.
Rosalind Dixon is Anthony Mason Professor and Scientia Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney, and Co-Director of the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab and Gender Equality Hub, as well as Director, Pathways to Politics Program for Women NSW. Her work focuses on comparative constitutional law and democracy, both in Australia and globally.
Senior Research Fellows
Theunis Roux is Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney. Before relocating to Australia in 2009, he was the founding Director of the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law (SAIFAC), now affiliated to the University of Johannesburg. He researches in comparative constitutional law, with a particular interest in the law and politics of constitutionalism in the Global South. He is the author of The Politics of Principle: The First South African Constitutional Court, 1995-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review: A Comparative Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His most recent major publication is ‘Grand Narratives of Transition: The Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa’ (2024) 57 VRÜ/WCL 5-71.
Federico Masera is a Scientia senior lecturer at the UNSW Business School, School of Economics. He quantitatively studies how the media and politicians shape attitudes toward marginalized groups, as well as the economic and social effects of exclusionary rhetoric. Currently, he is investigating the impact of online political influencers on polarization and anti-democratic attitudes.
Federico Masera
University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
Dr Hasin Yousaf’s research examines how economic forces interact with political behaviour, social outcomes, and public policy to shape resilient societies. His work addresses real-world challenges in governance, social cohesion, and institutional effectiveness, demonstrating how public events influence political preferences, how economic conditions affect community wellbeing, and how institutions adapt in polarized environments. Using rigorous, data-driven methods, his research deepens understanding of political polarization, informs the design of robust institutions that deter extremism and safeguard democratic norms, and strengthens policy debates on critical societal issues. These insights highlight pathways to bolster governance, reduce bias in public enforcement, and enhance community resilience – bridging academic research with policy impact.
Ashleigh Barnes is a Lecturer in Law in the School of Global and Public Law at the University of New South Wales. Ashleigh read the BCL and DPhil at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her thesis is titled ‘Australian Constitutional Values: The Case for Dignity’ Her work focusses on judicial decision-making, including judicial reliance on constitutional values as a mode of constitutional interpretation, the role of precedent and dissent. She also researches the meaning and role of dignity in constitutional law. Ashleigh is the co-convenor of the Judges & the Academy seminar series co-hosted by the G+T Centre for Public Law, the NSW Supreme Court and the Federal Court. Ashleigh has also been an invited expert at Judicial Dialogues in Sri Lanka and Brazil. Previously, Asheigh was a Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and Co-Chair of Oxford Pro Bono Publico.
Junior Research Fellows
Kyler Blackburn in an Economics Honours student at UNSW Sydney, having completed a double degree in Economics and Computer Science. He is interested in economic growth, institutional stability, and learning more about how the world can be made a better place.
Vitor Freire is a Research Fellow with the Resilient Democracy Lab and a PhD student in Economics at UNSW. He holds a B. Economics (Honours) and an M.Sc. in Economics. His primary research interests are in political economy, with a focus on mass media influence on elections, political polarization, and clientelism.
Mathew Idiculla is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. His research interests are in the areas of constitutionalism, federalism, local democracy, and cities. His doctoral thesis explores the idea and practice of decentralised constitutionalism in India, through an examination of how the authority over urban governance is organised, exercised, and contested between multiple constitutional actors. Prior to joining UNSW, he worked as an independent legal consultant and academic in India for over 12 years.
Shanil Wijesinha is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW, and his research interests are comparative constitutional law (with a focus on the Global South) and judicial decision-making. He is also a lecturer (on study leave) at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, and an attorney-at-law in Sri Lanka.
Aishwarya Singh is a doctoral candidate at the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice. Her doctoral research examines the development of rights for sexual minorities in India with a focus on judicial federalism. She has a Bachelor of Laws degree from Jindal Global Law School, India and a Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction) from the University of Oxford. She has previously worked as a judicial clerk for a former Chief Justice of India and as a lecturer at Jindal Global Law School, India. Her research interests include comparative constitutional law, family law, law and gender/sexuality.
Daniel Bogea is a PhD candidate in Comparative Constitutional Law at UNSW Sydney. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo and degrees in both Law and Political Science. His research focuses on courts and democratic resilience, judicial behaviour, and institutional responses to democratic backsliding, with particular expertise in comparative constitutionalism and Latin American judicial politics.
Research Affiliates
Professor of Economics, UNSW
Fellow of the Econometric Society
ARC Future Fellow
CEPR Fellow
Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
Co-director of the Gender Equality Hub
I am an Assistant Professor (tenure track) and Chair of Political Economy and eDemocracy at ETH Zurich (D-MTEC). I am also a Research Affiliate in Political Economy and Organizational Economics at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and hold an Affiliate Fellowship with the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth.
From 2021-2022, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. In 2021, I obtained my PhD in Economics from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. For the 2018-19 academic year, I was a visiting student/fellow at Harvard University. I am an affiliated researcher at the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab.
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. A comparative political scientist, I study when, why, and where citizens allow political elites committed to realizing democratic governance to come to power through elections. A key argument that threads through my work and book project is that in electoral contests where democracy is most threatened by authoritarian-leaning contenders, marginal democracy-indifferent voters become pivotal and decisive in producing democracy-conducive election outcomes. My work combines theoretical frameworks that link aggregated micro-behaviors to macro-outcomes with a range of empirical strategies, including observational, experimental, and qualitative comparative case studies. My research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and the European Journal of Political Research.
Lab Alumni Network
Chris Burnitt is a Research Fellow with the Resilient Democracy Lab. He is currently studying an MRes/PhD in economics at the University of Warwick, and holds a B.Ec (Hons) and B.Laws (Hons) from the University of New South Wales.
His research interests in political economy include the supply of information and narratives by mass media, and the formation and implications of political and national identities.
Lehan Zhang is a Research Fellow with the Resilient Democracy Lab. They are currently studying towards aPhD in economics at ETH Zurich and hold a B. Economics (Honours) (Econometrics) and B. Data Science and Decisions (Quantitative Data Science) from UNSW.
Their research interests are political economy, culture and identity, media, and NLP methods.
Administration
Marian is the Assistant Director of the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab, where she supports the Co-Directors in the Lab’s operations, partnerships, and public engagement activities. She also works with the UNSW Gender Equality Hub, and brings experience from the Pathways to Politics for Women program as well as passion for equality, participation, representation, and democratic resilience.
Contact details: marian.iskander@unsw.edu.au
Board of Advisors
Professor (by courtesy) of Economics and Political Science, School of Humanities and Sciences
Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Taubman Family Faculty Fellow for 2025–2026
Ran Hirschl (PhD, Yale) is University Professor, the David R. Cameron Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research interests focus on comparative public law, and in particular the intersection of comparative politics and comparative constitutionalism.
Maartje DE VISSER is a Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law and College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. Her research is in the field of comparative constitutional law writ large, with a special focus on constitutional engagement by courts and non-judicial actors. She also has an abiding interest in comparative methodology, including the role of language, questions of constitutional design in small states and the role of international advice vis-a-vis national constitutional law.
I am an Associate Professor (with tenure) and the Deputy Dean for Faculty and Research at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. My main interests lie in applied game theory, political economy and economics of information. My current research focuses on analyzing how legislative bargaining affects the nature and the efficiency of policies as well as the sources of polarization. I am also interested in strategic underpinnings of political scandals and their consequences for accountability.
