Doctoral Candidate
About
Tyler is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan, where he is also completing an M.A. in Statistics. Why does a party that rests on the same communities hold together in one place and come apart in another? Tyler studies population structure, the spatially arranged communities that political parties rest on, and how it shapes party systems. His starting point is that communal groups are largely made rather than inherited: they take shape through geography, colonial institutions, and state-led settlement, and they shift again as development and migration rearrange where people live. As that structure changes, the coalitions parties depend on tend to change with it, and parties in turn try to hold, adjust to, or reshape the populations that sustain them.
Tyler treats this as both a substantive and a methodological question, since the two are difficult to separate here: because communal groups are constructed and internally divided, group behavior cannot simply be read off aggregate election returns. He therefore works in comparative politics (parties, elections, and ethnic and urban-rural cleavages) alongside political methodology (ecological inference, multilevel regression with poststratification, spatial models, and corrections for measurement error), and he builds the datasets these questions tend to require, often from primary sources in Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian.
Most of Tyler's work centers on Malaysia, where he traces how the settlement geography of Malay and Chinese communities helped build, and later helped unsettle, the coalition behind Barisan Nasional (the National Front, BN). He takes the same questions to Taiwan, Japan, and Indonesia, and, increasingly, to the United States. In Florida, he is tracing how Latino communities have moved and re-sorted across the state over the past two decades, using geocoded religious sites and music-radio listening as signals of communal change, to understand the conservative turn among Latino voters. In New York City, he is beginning fieldwork on the overseas-Chinese community that also figures in Malaysian politics, now embedded in a very different party system.
Outside the academy, he is dad of two black cats, Erik and Theda, and a volunteer cat foster with the Humane Society of Huron Valley.
