Tyler Rongxuan Chen

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. What lies behind the change of political parties and party systems? He studies both the elite origins and the societal foundations of that change. On the elite side, he asks how much power party elites wield when they build united campaign platforms, and how much damage they inflict on the vehicles they built when factional interests pull them apart. On the societal side, he treats voter groups as the other set of players: how far the geographical distribution of racial and ethnic groups drives regional party fragmentation, and what part the rise and fall of age cohorts plays in the birth and death of parties. His dissertation and book project, "The Tower of Babel We Bury: Geography, Group-Making, and the Communal Foundations of Party Systems," asks when the mismatch between a party's demographic umbrella and the group's internal heterogeneity grows too large for the platform to hold, and what happens to the party system when the buried difference reasserts itself. He develops the argument across the United States, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan, tracing how the settlement geography of Malay and Chinese communities helped build, and later helped unsettle, the coalition behind Barisan Nasional, and following two decades of Florida's registered voters as Hispanic communities move and re-sort across the state.

He treats the substantive question as a methodological one as well: answering it requires recovering how groups actually vote from aggregate election returns and censuses, and he builds the ecological-inference tools that do so. The flagship is the Bayesian Approximate Computation with Hierarchical Framework (BACH), a simulation-based estimator that recovers subgroup voting behavior where partisan polarization, cross-cutting cleavages, and survey nonresponse defeat existing tools. His approach is multi-method by necessity, joining formal models to archives, candidate-level career panels to multi-sited fieldwork, and geocoded election and census panels to hierarchical Bayesian estimation. His research appears in the Journal of East Asian Studies, where he shows that Malaysia's celebrated urban–rural divide is largely an artifact of aggregation, leaving ethnicity the dominant axis of party competition.

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: tylerrongxuanchen.github.io/