Comparative Politics & Methodology
Email: tylercr@umich.edu
Dissertation Title: The Tower of Babel We Built: How the Geography of Population Groups Creates Scale Effects on Party Systems
Summary: Tyler Rongxuan Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing, with a concurrent M.A. in Statistics, working at the junction of comparative politics and political methodology. One question runs through his research: when and how do party systems realign or come apart as the population groups beneath them move, grow, shrink, and re-cluster? His dissertation argues that parties stand not on individual voters but on territorially arranged groups — the same electorate can sustain a coalition under one spatial arrangement and break it under another. When urbanization, migration, or generational replacement re-sorts those groups, voter blocs realign from below, and elites defect from within. He develops the argument across the United States, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan, combining geocoded settlement and election panels built from primary sources with surveys, archives, and satellite data.
His article in the Journal of East Asian Studies shows that Malaysia's celebrated urban–rural divide is largely an artifact of aggregation, leaving ethnicity the dominant axis of party competition. Papers under review trace how colonial institutionalization set the terrain of communal politics in Malaysia and Indonesia, how regime elites coordinate collective abdication through public signals — a global game tested on an original day-by-day dataset from Indonesia's 1998 transition — and how mobilizational campaigns keep the party-state's bureaucracy subordinate to political ends. On the methods side, he develops the Bayesian Approximate Computation with Hierarchical framework (BACH), a simulation-based ecological-inference estimator that recovers subgroup voting behavior from aggregate election returns when survey nonresponse, partisan polarization, and within-group cleavages defeat existing tools. Chen has taught across Michigan's quantitative methods sequence — the graduate statistics core, undergraduate quantitative methods, and data science — and served as a teaching assistant for causal inference and theoretical modeling at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Summer Program. He is prepared to teach quantitative methods at every level, alongside courses on parties, elections, and East and Southeast Asian politics. He works with primary sources in Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian.
Personal Website: TBA
