William Kakenmaster

Areas of Interest: Environmental Politics, Authoritarian Regimes, Comparative Political Economy, Comparative Political Institutions, Measurement Models, Causal Inference

Bill Kakenmaster is a PhD candidate in comparative politics and methodology at the University of Notre Dame and a PhD Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

His research examines the politics and political economy of climate change and the environment. His dissertation, Decarbonizing Dictatorship: Explaining Climate Action in Non-Democracies, explains how corruption can either have positive or negative effects on climate action in non-democracies depending on the industries in which corruption is concentrated. He uses a mix of quantitative techniques for causal inference with observational panel data and process-tracing analysis of qualitative evidence for climate action and inaction in the cases of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Bill was a research assistant for the Hoover Institution and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA from American University.