Gabriel’s research works to understand the ways in which citizens with fewer resources become motivated to participate in politics and how this process is shaped by, and reshapes, the distribution of economic resources in society. He has field experience conducting surveys, interviews, and experiments in southern and east Africa as well as the United States. Gabriel also has advanced methodological training in both quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Gabriel’s dissertation work addresses our understanding of when individuals will choose to invest in recruiting others into politics. His other projects include a study of how campaign mobilization shapes political interest in the United States, a review of how activists can overcome the collective action problem, and a white paper for the MIT Work of the Future Taskforce on strategic innovations in the American labor movement.

At MIT, Gabriel is a member of the MIT Gov/Lab, a research team dedicated to practice-oriented research on political accountability. Most recently, Gabriel is a winner of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Kenan Sahin Presidential Fellowship.

Before coming to MIT, Gabriel spent two years as a Research and Training Officer for Equal Education, a social movement organization in South Africa. Before which he spent two years working for the Southeastern Council of Foundation, for which he was a Senior Research, Data, and Content associate.

1. Dissertation Project Nobody Asked: Why Activists [Don’t] Recruit Mixes interviews, surveys, text analysis, practitioner partnerships, and experiments to identify factors influencing individual political recruitment behavior in the US and South African contexts.

2. Under Review Awakened: The Potential for Mobilization to Reshape Interest in Politics Takes advantage of discongruous political mobilization in the 2012 presidential election to assess the impact of this organizing on individual political interest. A version of this paper was presented at MPSA (2019) and APSA (2019).

3. In Progress: Beyond the NLRA: Organizing Workers of the Future Employs an original database of recent labor news to disentangle developments in collective action. This white paper is part of the MIT Work of the Future Taskforce.

4. In Progress: The Mobilization Toolbox: Mechanism for Overcoming the Collective Action Problem. Reviews existing literature to create a framework for understanding “non-rational” solutions to the collective action problem.

5. Masters Thesis: Organized Labor in a Globalized World: The Impact of Increased International Economic Integration on the Strategies of Trade Unions Draws from a century of text and event data in the United Kingdom to understand variation in trade union responses to globalization. A version of this project was submitted in completion of a masters in political science at Emory University.