Jasper Cooper

Jasper Cooper specializes in the comparative politics of developing countries, with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. His research combines qualitative fieldwork with field experimentation to study how institutions influence power inequalities and violence between individuals. For example, he has studied the role of state and non-state institutions in shaping gender inequality in Papua New Guinea, how electoral institutions affect cycles of police extortion in West Africa, the factors that determine whether people support extra-judicial mob violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how mass media and religious authority shape social norms around violence against women in Uganda. Jasper also works on tools to improve research design, including a framework and software to explore and diagnose research designs pro- and retrospectively, as well as experimental designs to detect diffusion effects. Jasper completed his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University.