Gabriel’s research seeks 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 advanced methodological training in both quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Gabriel’s dissertation work addresses our understanding of when political activists will choose to “organize,” to center recruiting the disengaged into politics as their method of creating social change. His other projects include studies of how campaign mobilization shapes political interest in the United States and of the strategic responses of trade unions to globalization in rich countries. He is further writing 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.

1. Dissertation Project From Activist to Organizer: When Policy Advocates Invest in Democracy

2. Working Paper Awakened: The Potential for Mobilization to Reshape Interest in Politics A version of this paper was presented at MPSA (2019) and APSA (2019).

3. In Progress: Beyond the NLRA: Organizing Workers of the Future 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.

5. Masters Thesis: Organized Labor in a Globalized World: The Impact of Increased International Economic Integration on the Strategies of Trade Unions A version of this project was submitted in completion of a masters in political science at Emory University.