Gabriel Nahmias is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT. He works at the intersection of institutions and political behavior, seeking to better understand when low-income people are recruited into politics and how this process is shaped by, and reshapes, the distribution of resources in society. In pursuit of this topic, Nahmias’s dissertation focuses on the origins of the “theories of change,” which determine the strategic choices of pro-poor policy advocates in the US and South Africa. His other ongoing projects include studies of the effects of campaign mobilization on political interest in the US, the strategic choices of trade unions to globalization in rich countries, and what determines local government responsiveness to citizen pressure in South Africa. For the Work of the Future Task Force, Nahmias is producing a white paper on the landscape of collective worker responses to the changing nature of work, focusing on innovation in the structures and strategies of the modern labor movement.
