Scholars have pointed out a need in the ongoing work on authoritarian institutions to cultivate a focus that is more sensitive to how institutions form and change.  In support of this effort, my research is concerned with institution-building and political trajectories. My focus on comparative political institutions aims to develop concrete explanations for the causes and processes of state development, based on expectations regarding individual agency, costs and benefits, and incentive structures.  One goal of comparative institutional research is to identify and conceptualize institutions in authoritarian regimes. In some of my research, I compared extant typologies of authoritarian regime types to identify their strengths and weaknesses with regard to measurement validity.  My research also supports the use of institutionally similar 'types' to explain the relationship between institutions and political outcomes—such as terrorism and expropriation—, which is a second goal in institutional research.  There is also a renewed focus in the literature on the temporal mechanisms and pathways by which institutions affect outcomes. To this end, my research focuses on developing methodologies for testing arguments about the sequential impact of institutions and events.