Anne Meng is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research centers on authoritarian politics and institutions, and game-theoretic approaches to the study of dictatorship. Meng also studies democratic erosion, leadership succession, ruling parties, electoral authoritarianism, and coup-proofing, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and looks for new ways to collect data on authoritarian institutions. Meng is a fall 2019 visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at New York University during the spring of 2020. She is currently working on a book project that examines how executive constraints become established in dictatorships, formally within state constitutions and informally within presidential cabinets.