Hire a Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: "Psychological Groundings of Group Mobilization in Clientelist Democracies"

Committee: Noah Nathan (MIT, co-chair), Allen Hicken (co-chair), Charlotte Cavaille, and Ted Brader

Summary: Please check my webpage for detailed information on my research: www.pa-surveys.xyz

Dissertation Title: "Collective Action in Autocracies: The Case of Workers and Strikes in China"

Committee: Mary Gallagher (co-chair); Nahomi Ichino (co-chair, Emory University); Christian Davenport, David Miller (Economics), Xiaohong Xu (Sociology)

Summary: Yuequan Guo is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research investigates two questions: 1) how do ordinary people overcome barriers to collective action and mobilize in autocracies, and 2) what reduces repressive activities by authoritarian states. Specifically, he examines how Chinese workers initiate strikes despite limited external support, how strikes spread in the hinterland of China, and how workers in the hinterland resist pressure from employers in new ways. Addressing the two theoretical questions in the context of China also leads him to study the domestic migration of Chinese workers, which disseminates the knowledge and experience of collective action and changes the cost and benefit of repressive activities for government officials. He approaches these questions with a variety of methods, including formal theory, statistical models, network analysis, and ethnography. For more information, please visit https://yuequanguo.com. 

Dissertation Title: "Coercion and Provisions: The Dynamics of Territorial Control and Wartime Aid"

Committee: Jim Morrow (Chair), Yuri Zhukov, Chris Fariss, Kevin Quinn

Summary: For more information about my research and teaching, please visit: https://timothyleejones.com

Dissertation Title: “The Origins and Legacies of Violence in Korea”

Committee: Mark Dincecco (co-chair), Yuri Zhukov (co-chiar), Dan Slater, Mary Gallagher, Jean Hong

Summary: I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. My research interest lies at the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and Korean politics. I study wars, violence, state-building, and legacy of colonial rule, with an empirical focus on Korea. In my work, I demonstrate how war-making contributes to state-making by allowing states to define and eliminate potential threats to a vulnerable regime while establishing a long-run base of support by mobilizing those who participated in the war effort. I also evaluate how past and present wars shape policymaking processes and how such effects evolve with time. My dissertation project examines the relationship between prewar resistance against the state and civilian killings during the Korean War.

www.hojungjoo.com
 

Dissertation Title: “Long-Run Effects of Religious Institutions on Development”

Committee: Mark Tessler (co-chair), Lawrence Root (co-chair), Brian Min, Mark Dincecco, Karen Staller

Summary: I am a Ph.D. candidate with a research interest in the political economy of development from a comparative and historical perspective. For my dissertation, I am using village level census data, and a novel dataset of historical Muslim religious institutions in India constructed from digitized government records, along with fieldwork and archival research. In my dissertation, I argue that legacies of decentralized religious institutions complement the prevailing economic and governance institutions, while legacies of imperial religious institutions compete with centralized institutions. Differences in the market dependency and coordination mechanisms anchored by the religious institution type durably affect development and democratic outcomes in opposing ways. I provide empirical evidence from the India, where the religious institutions of Sufi Khanaqah and Madrasa evolved from the 13th century onwards. I construct a novel dataset of Madrasa and Khanaqah locations for all villages of India. The dataset is integrated with census-level data for the years 1991, 2001, and 2011, road upgradation data for 2000-2015, and pooled assembly election results for 1974-2018. Multiple placebo tests and instrumental variable analysis corroborate causality in the hypothesized relationships. I also research returns to risk-sharing in microfinance groups and the puzzle of lower infant mortality in the poorer Muslim minority in India. My research has been supported by Rackham fellowships and grants (internal) and the Humane Studies fellowship (external). I was a Rackham Predoctoral fellow and Rackham International fellow as well.

https://www.taharauf.com

Dissertation Title: "The Politics of Police Protection" 

Committee:  Charles Shipan (co-chair), Mara Ostfeld (co-chair), Vincent Hutchings and Kevin Quinn

In recent years, proponents of the “Defund the Police” movement have called for scaling back police presence, pointing to the potential benefits of smaller police forces for Black and Latino Americans who suffer from over-policing. Smaller police forces, reformers argue, would result in less discrimination and police violence against Black and Latino Americans. At the same time, however, policing’s role in deterring crime makes the effect of changes in police numbers ambiguous, especially for Black Americans who are disproportionately exposed to criminal violence. What, then, is the effect of police on voting participation and attitudes? This project is the first to theorize and empirically test the effect of police numbers on political behavior and attitudes across racial groups. I theorize that police indirectly affect political outcomes through their effects on crime. Importantly, I argue that Black Americans are uniquely positioned to benefit from reductions in crime. Using data from a natural experiment and two survey experiments, I find evidence consistent with my theory. Perhaps most importantly, I find that police increase Black turnout, primarily among Black men — the group most at risk of criminal victimization. This project speaks to the importance of incorporating criminal violence into our theories of the political consequences of criminal-justice policies and institutions.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at bromero@umich.edu.

Dissertation Title: “Remobilizing Resentment: Intrareligious Elite Polarization and the Escalation of Violence against Religious Minorities During Myanmar’s Political Liberalization”

Committee: Allen Hicken (co-chair), Dan Slater (co-chair), Pauline Jones, Yuri Zhukov

My research focuses on questions related to the intersection of state- and nation-building, authoritarianism, religion, and political violence. I explore these questions primarily in Southeast Asia, where I have extensive area knowledge and fieldwork experience. In my research, I use a combination of fieldwork, comparative historical analysis, structured interviews, quasi-experimental methods, and automated text analysis.

My dissertation and subsequent book project “Remobilizing Resentment: Intrareligious Elite Polarization and the Escalation of Violence against Religious Minorities During Myanmar’s Political Liberalization” challenges the assumption in existing literature that political elites’ provocations against minorities during regime change inevitably lead to large-scale anti-minority violence. My dissertation advances the argument that escalation is conditional; intragroup polarization among majority elites along the traditional-secular/rationalist cleavage is one factor that increases the risk of escalation against minority outgroups. I focus specifically on religious leaders and large-scale violence against religious minorities through the case of anti-Muslim violence during Myanmar’s political liberalization. I support my argument with data from seven months of fieldwork in Myanmar, historical analysis, structured interviews with Buddhist monks, and a subnational dataset on religious leaders participation in an anti-Muslim movement.

My other current research projects center around the role of information communication technologies (ICT) in contentious politics. Under what conditions are new ICTs tools of political liberation? I have a co-authored paper in the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics that uses Myanmar language public Facebook posts after the 2021 military coup to demonstrate how prior digital activism enhanced activists’ ability to harness the internet for resistance. A paper in progress uses a differences-in-differences design to disentangle the relative effect of internet cuts on anti-regime protests and military repression after the 2021 Myanmar military coup. In another working paper, I leverage two unique datasets of public election-related posts during Myanmar’s 2020 election to classify election fraud disinformation and to analyze its spread and virality.

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Dissertation Title: “Anticolonial Cosmopolitanisms: Young Ottoman Anticolonial Thinkers and Projects of Global Integration, 1884-1914”

Committee: Lisa Disch (co-chair), Murad Idris (co-chair), David Temin, Fatma Müge Göçek

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at merisa@umich.edu.

Dissertation Title: "Building Bipartisan Trust in Political Fact-Checking"

Committee: Ted Brader (co-chair), Arthur Lupia (co-chair), Brendan Nyhan, Mara Ostfeld, Phoebe Ellsworth

Summary: For more information about my dissertation, research, and teaching, please visit: https://www.hwayongshin.com/

Dissertation Title: “Temporalities of Struggle: Beginning and Belonging in the African Socialist Tradition”

Committee: Lisa Disch (chair), David Temin, Anne Pitcher, Omolade Adunbi

Summary: I am a political theorist focused on African Political Thought and the relationship between time and democracy. In particular, I am interested in how members of political communities understand their spatial and temporal boundaries. Spatially, how do bonds of identity and responsibility change from the sub-national to the global scale, or across vast distances where markets and legacies of domination bind them together, but institutions separate them? Temporally, how do groups’ memories and practices reproduce domination or reveal possibilities for democratic participation and emancipation? Provoking dialogue among non-Western, canonical, and critical theory, I broaden the scope of the history of political thought and explore what it means to build just communities in response to colonialism and racial capitalism. I accomplish this by using interdisciplinary sources and research methods. My sources range from those more familiar to political theory, like speeches and written arguments, to forms of artistic expression, rituals, cultural practices, and oral tradition. I evaluate these by combining close reading of texts, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research in English and Swahili. I have published peer-reviewed articles in dialogue with critical debates in political science, geography, and Africana Studies in Political Theory and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. My dissertation, which I will develop as my first book project, shows how leaders and thinkers in the African socialist tradition (broadly understood) distinguished their strategies through their interpretations of time—the accessibility or usefulness of the past, the potentials for the future, the “rupture” of colonialism or revolution, etc—and how their uses of time inspire forceful reinterpretations of concepts like capitalist violence, universality, culture, and founding. In my teaching, I approach canonical sources in global conversation and offer specialized courses in Africana political thought, comparative experiences of race & colonialism, and the politics of time. I get excited about helping students understand the world around them, the concepts that can help them make sense of it, and the systems that connect them to the past and to others. Whether in introductory surveys or advanced seminars, my students learn to confidently approach complex texts, clearly communicate their ideas in writing and discussion, engage one another graciously, and approach political problems systematically and empathetically.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at dtsuell@umich.edu.
 

Dissertation Title: “Supervision Science: Bureaucratic Control in China from Mao to Xi”

Committee: Mary Gallagher (chair); Jenna Bednar, Pauline Jones, Xiaohong Xu

Summary: For more information about my research, visit: www.mthompsonbrusstar.com

Dissertation Title: “Body Politic: Disability and Political Cohesion”

Committee: Vincent Hutchings (chair), Donald Kinder, Robert Mickey, Annie Heffernan, Leonie Huddy

Summary: My research focuses on the politics of disability in the United States and other advanced democracies. I am particularly interested in stereotypes and social cognition, the formation and behavioral implications of political identities, and the psychological foundations of political cohesion and cooperation. I study these and other topics using a range of methodological techniques, including survey and experimental methods, text analysis, and comparative-historical analysis. My dissertation and book project (Body Politic: Disability and Political Cohesion) examines the political psychology of disability in the United States. Using original national surveys and experiments, I develop and validate a new measure of disability as a subjective political identity, and demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of this identity for political behavior, policy attitudes, and intergroup relations. In a related research program, I investigate public attitudes toward citizens with disabilities in the United Kingdom (with Jac Larner, Cardiff University). Using survey experiments and observational data, we examine how correcting misperceptions about people with disabilities shapes public attitudes toward redistributive policies for disabled citizens. This research is funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. I am a recipient of the Rapoport Family Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant, the Gerald R. Ford Fellowship, and the Converse-Miller Fellowship in American Political Behavior at the Center for Political Studies.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at jrthorp@umich.edu.

https://joshthorp.com/

Dissertation Title: "Building States within Societies: Repression and Education in British Burma"

Committee: Mark Dincecco (chair), Allen Hicken, Nahomi Ichino (Emory), Dan Slater, Marlous van Waijenburg (Harvard)

Summary: My research and teaching interests are substantively situated in comparative political economy and conflict studies, with a regional expertise in Southeast Asia. In my research, I develop formal models, construct original data from archival research, and combine historical research with quantitative analyses to study the interconnections between indigenous political history, state violence, and state education policy.

My dissertation examines the key conditions that historically influenced state development, specifically how states allocate their resources for physical coercion and education provision under significant and chronic fiscal constraints. I do so within the historical context of colonial states (with a focus on British Burma), where such constraints were especially prevalent when compared to the contemporaneous European states. Each of the three dissertation chapters show that pre-colonial indigenous institutions, which were fundamental in shaping state-society relations, explain the spatial and temporal patterns of state violence and state involvement in education in colonial states. They also form a significant part of my book project that investigates the underrepresented yet important role indigenous society and its relationship with the state played in the long-run development of colonial and post-independence contexts, focusing on Burma/Myanmar.

Outside of the dissertation research and book project, my work studies the history of state-society relations regarding education provision in other colonial contexts as well as the impact of state policy on education outcomes. For more information about my research, visit: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/htzaw/.