Please click on the + next to candidate names for bio & dissertation information.
| First Name | Last Name | Contact Info | Subfield | Bio | Dissertation Title | Research Interests | Teaching Interests | Dissertation Summary | Personal Website Address |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stephen | Cucharo | scucharo@ucla.edu | Contemporary political theory, modern political theory, critical theory, the history of political thought. | In 2024 I received my PhD in Political Science from UCLA. I also hold an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research, an MS in Global Affairs from NYU, and a BA in Political Science from Fordham University. My research interests include modern political thought, contemporary political thought, psychoanalysis and politics, fascism, pessimism, and theories of guilt and responsibility. From 2020-2021 and from June 2023 to December 2023 I served as Assistant Editor of Political Theory. My work is published in Contemporary Political Theory and parallax. I’m currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. | Guilty Subjects, Reparative Politics: On Guilt and Political Theory after Freud | I am interested in how political theorists in the modern and contemporary period make sense of human suffering, particularly emotional and moral suffering. In addition to my dissertation project, my current research explores the centrality of negative emotions (despair, dread, rage, etc) in contemporary far-right politics. | My teaching interests are diverse, but mainly situated in the fields of modern and contemporary political theory. I have been the lead instructor for ten courses. Some include: “September 11th and Contemporary Political Theory: Power, Affect, and Memory”, “Marx and Marxism”, “Violence in Modern Thought”, and “Fascism”. | My dissertation offers a challenge to a paradigmatic way of approaching guilt in contemporary political thought. I argue the indebtedness to a Nietzschean-Freudian conceptualization of guilt, which associates this emotion with self-regard, lawfulness, inertia, and self-abasement, has either written off guilt-feelings as hindrances to political engagement, or regards the guilty subject as beset by operations of power that bind them to authoritative injunctions. As a result of the attachment to this paradigm, political theorists still have yet to seriously engage alternative framings of guilt that cast it as a potentially productive dissonance that attunes subjects into their implication in the suffering of others. The foundational categories of this alternative perspective were pioneered by Melanie Klein, who not only casts guilt-feelings as expressions of value, but also suggests that potentially productive forms of guilt are actualized in different ways depending on the interpretive significance that we grant to these feelings themselves. In other words, what we do with guilt-feelings is dependent on political scripts that narrate action in response. Two central figures of 20th century political thought, John Rawls and Theodor Adorno, offer politicized readings of the categories and concepts pioneered by Klein. These differing processes of emotional script-writing give theorists a glimpse of how, and for which purposes, reparative impulses emanating from senses of guilt can be narrated and directed in conflicting ways, one in line with liberal political thought and the other in critical theoretical terms. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the nature of “white guilt”. | https://stephencucharo.wordpress.com/ |
| Joshua | Ferrer | joshuaferrer@ucla.edu | American Politics, Methods, Racial and Ethnic Politics, Comparative Politics | I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. I study the resilience of American election administration in the face of increasing partisan polarization, the limits of local accountability, racial underrepresentation, and heightened turnover. My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The American Political Science Review and The British Journal of Political Science; in reports with the Bipartisan Policy Center; and in media outlets such as The Washington Post. My work has also received coverage from major news sites including NBC, NPR, and The Guardian. | Making Elections Happen: Accountability, Diversity, and Partisanship in U.S. Election Administration | My research studies challenges to democratic elections in the United States, with an emphasis on state and local politics. I combine large-scale original data collections on elections with administrative datasets, employ modern empirical techniques for causal inference, and field large-scale survey experiments to study questions about partisanship, accountability, and representation. | I have taught courses in American politics and maintain an active lab of undergraduate research assistants. I am well prepared to teach graduate and undergraduate courses on American politics and policy, methods, race and ethnicity politic, local and state politics, and political institutions. | My dissertation, “Making Elections Happen: Accountability, Diversity, and Partisanship in U.S. Election Administration”, examines emerging challenges to election administration including partisan polarization, the limits of local accountability, racial underrepresentation, and heightened turnover in the profession. Election administration in the US is fragmented into thousands of individual offices that are tasked with running elections for their community. My dissertation studies these people, the institutions that select them, and their behavior in office. In the first paper, “To Elect or Appoint? Evidence from Local Election Administration” (R&R at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science), I cast doubt on the ability of voters to effectively monitor and sanction local officials, finding that appointed local election officials outperform their directly elected counterparts. The second paper presents evidence of a major diversification of election administration leaders and finds that while minority and white election officials administer elections in similar ways, voters of color are empowered by election officials who look like them. In the third paper, published in the American Political Science Review, I study the extent to which increasing polarization nationwide affects the way that Democratic and Republican local election officials run elections. A fourth paper examines whether increasing turnover among election officials negatively affects the quality of elections. These projects form a book project, in addition to a planned fifth paper examining the effect of legislative, executive, and legal actions at the state level that limit the discretion of local officials to carry out their duties. | https://www.joshuaferrer.com/ |
| Frank | Wyer | frank.wyer@nps.edu | International Relations; Comparative Politics | My name is Frank Wyer. In 2023, I completed my PhD in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In my dissertation, I investigated post-conflict violence perpetrated by rebel splinter groups after Colombia's 2016 peace agreement. My post-dissertation research focuses on the recent surge in violence and transnational organized crime in Ecuador. Recent papers have been accepted in International Organization and the British Journal of Political Science. I have experience teaching courses in several subfields, including IR, CP, and Methods. | Defending the Peace: Causes, Consequences, and Responses to Postconflict Violence | My research focuses on the behavior of rebel and criminal groups, the design and implementation of peace and security policies, and the attitudes of civilians in areas affected by violence. I employ a range of empirical approaches including methods of observational causal inference, survey experiments, and field work. | I am prepared to teach courses across a range of subfields including Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Methods. At UCLA, I was an instructor of record for three quarters and TA for seven, during which time I taught courses ranging from undergraduate IR to graduate experimental methods. | My dissertation project centers on the threats to peace in countries emerging from armed conflict. I focus on the case of Colombia, where a 2016 peace agreement with the country’s largest rebel group, the FARC, has been threatened by the emergence and expansion of dissident FARC factions that reject peace. In my job market paper, I study the causes of the FARC’s fragmentation In contrast to the existing literature on the topic, which offers a top-down model of rebel group fragmentation, I propose that Colombia experienced ``middle-out'' rebel fragmentation, in which opportunities to profit from drug trafficking led middle and low-level FARC commanders to defect and form splinter groups. I provide multiple lines of evidence for this argument, including a descriptive analysis showing that middle and low-level commanders drove the process of splinter group emergence, and quantitative evidence showing that FARC splinter groups were roughly 30 percentage points more likely to emerge in territory valuable for drug trafficking and production. In my second paper, I focus on the threat dissident factions pose to the peace agreement’s implementation, showing how their expansion has resulted in a wave of violence against demobilized combatants. In my third paper, I investigated how the FARC's resurgence affected civilians' support for current and future peace processes. Using a survey experiment with more than 1400 Colombian civilians living in a mix of conflict and non-conflict zones, I show that political messaging about who is to blame for postconflict violence can influence how violence affects attitudes towards peace. | https://www.frankwyer.com/ |
| Alexandria | Davis | ajdavis29@g.ucla.edu | American Politics, Political Behavior, Race and Ethnic Politics, Black Politics, and Political Psychology | Alexandria Davis is a UCLA Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science with a concentration in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and American Politics. Her research observes political behavior and public opinion of marginalized communities. | The Black Apathetic Voter: Exploring the Contours of Black Non-Voting | American politics, Race and ethnic politics, Black political behavior, political psychology, intersectionality, American elections | Racial and Ethnic Politics, American Politics, Political Psychology, Emotions and Politics, Gender and Politics | “No vote, no voice” is a common sentiment expressed among the Black community surrounding political participation. However, this rhetoric leaves members of the Black electorate who do not feel their political gains are being met by the current political system out of the discussion. I seek to provide a modern profile of Black non-voters and posit a theory of Black voter apathy that explains a potential increase in Black non-voting in future presidential elections. To further explore this phenomenon, I ask three research questions: 1) What is the status of Black voting and non-voting in 2020? 2) Under what conditions can Black non-voters be mobilized to vote? 3) How can a measure of Black voter apathy aid in the understanding of Black political participation? I engage with a quantitative approach to answer these research questions which includes pre-existing survey data, an original survey experiment, and a survey testing a novel measure of Black voter apathy. I contend that to remedy a potential rise of Black non-voting a new measure that encapsulates the psychological experience that Black voters are facing. I propose a 10-point measure to best measure Black voter apathy within this dissertation for future research. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to advocate for those members of the Black electorate who feel disillusioned by electoral politics and seek alternative avenues for political engagement. Additionally, it seeks to serve as a nexus for Black political thought, psychology, and political science to better understand the Black electorate. | https://www.alexandria-davis.com/ |
| Qi | Jing | titan66618ucla@g.ucla.edu | Political Theory, Chinese Political Thought, Comparative Political Theory, Contemporary Democratic Theory, Theory of the State. | Qi Jing is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, anticipating his degree in June 2025. His research explores the link between Chinese political thought and the concepts of the state and democracy. He is working on two book projects, including Holistic Dynamism: A Chinese Conception of the State and A New State of Democracy. Qi has published in Comparative Philosophy and Chinese Political Science Review and co-authored works on cosmopolitanism and leadership in international relations. He has received the Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award and the Shapiro Family Fellowship at UCLA. | Holistic Dynamism: A Chinese Conception of the State | My research explores the link between Chinese political thought and the concept of the state, asking how the former can help us to critically reevaluate and add to Western understandings of the latter. Drawing upon the deep archive of Chinese political thought, especially from the late 19th century to the present, I explore how a new conception of the state that is sensitive to non-Western ideas and experiences can be articulated and defended. | I am interested in teaching introductory courses on classical, early modern, and modern political thought, as well as political theory research methods. I am eager to develop thematic courses like “Introduction to Chinese Political Thought” and offer specialized seminars such as “Democratic Theory from a Comparative Perspective,” drawing on thinkers from Africa, Latin America, the Islamic world, and Asia. | My dissertation, Holistic Dynamism: A Chinese Conception of the State, articulates and defends a conception of the state informed by Chinese historical and philosophical perspectives but directed towards the problems of 21st-century global politics. Drawing on modern Chinese political theorists from 1895 to the present (e.g., Liang Qichao, Zhang Junmai, Gao Yihan, and Luo Longji), the dissertation adopts a comparative perspective to think about the state with and against Western frameworks. In contrast to European accounts of state personhood that imagine the state as a fictive, legal entity, the dissertation presents an argument, based on Chinese sources, for theorizing the state as a concrete, living human agent. Holistic Dynamism makes two broader contributions to the field of political theory. First, it reconstructs a set of debates surrounding the emergence of the normative concept of the state within East Asian political thought by exploring the reception and transformation of Western ideas within the Chinese context. This historical reconstruction serves in addition to reveal blind spots and limitations of typical Western theoretical approaches, many of which are related to the highly reductive, individualistic perspective used to understand the coordinated action that constitutes state behavior. Second, it builds on this reconstruction to argue for an organicist conception of the state as a real, living person with concrete human agency, one that allows the state to encounter challenges as evolutionary opportunities to rejuvenate and transform itself. This novel account of state personhood reimagines how state sovereignty and responsibility should be understood within international political thought, legal thought, and international politics. | https://www.jing-qi.net/ |
| Sean | Ewing | sewing1@ucla.edu | American Politics, Political Communication, Methods, State and Local Politics | I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. My research focuses on media, representation, and political participation, with a particular emphasis on local institutions and local politics. My dissertation primarily studies how changes in the news media have impacted local news content and political behavior. | Changes in the News Industry and its Impact on Local News Production and Political Behavior | Political Communication, State and Local Politics, Elections, Political Behavior, Information and Technology, Public Policy and the LGBTQ Community | American Politics, Political Communication, Mass Media and Technology, American Politics Institutions, American Political Behavior | I examine the causes behind the decline of local news and its impact on news content, civic engagement and political behavior. I use original datasets that detail the ownership, availability, content and production schedule of every daily and weekly newspaper in the United States, which I then combine with data on voter knowledge and election outcomes to assess the effects of changes in the local news environment on local news content and civic life. My results suggest that changes in the news industry have resulted in less local political news content and more national political news content — and consequently, diminished citizen knowledge and engagement, with worrisome implications for the accountability of local officials. | https://www.seantewing.com/ |
| Doeun | Kim | doeun2@ucla.edu | International Relations, International Political Economy, Political Methodology, American Politics, Comparative Politics | Doeun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also a member of the UCLA Practical Causal Inference Lab and an MS student in the Statistics and Data Science Department at UCLA. She received her MA in International Relations and BA in International Relations and International Cooperation and Development Studies from Seoul National University. She studies international political economy and political methodology. Specifically, her research examines how interest groups influence foreign economic policies. Her solo-authored paper on the role of firms in foreign aid was recently published in International Interactions. | What Money Can’t (or Can) Buy: Inward Foreign Direct Investment and Backlash against Globalization in Developed States | My research centers on the influence of multinational corporations within the realm of international political economy, including foreign direct investments and foreign aid. Additionally, with my coauthors, I also develop a user-friendly machine learning tool for causal inference beyond observable data to enhance methodological approaches in social science. | I am equipped to teach core courses in international relations (e.g., Introduction to International Relations, International Political Economy), as well as more specialized courses (e.g., Domestic Politics and IPE, Interest Group Politics). Additionally, I would love to offer a variety of methodological courses, including Data Analysis and Causal Inference. | In my book-style dissertation, I explore how foreign direct investments shape public attitudes toward foreign economic policies and globalization. Canonical economic theories have diagnosed the rise of the anti-globalization movement and far-right parties as a product of the economic losers of globalization. Moving beyond these theories, which rely on the distributive effects of globalization, I investigate how foreign companies' bad actions, such as unfair treatment of workers and environmental damage, undermine public support for open foreign economic policies and increase hostility toward partner countries. Using experimental and observational studies, I examine the effect of these bad actions in OECD countries to test my theory at three levels: the individual worker level, the community level, and the country level. First, I conduct a survey at the individual worker level in the U.S. to demonstrate that negative work experiences at foreign companies increase antipathy toward foreign investments and partner countries. In another chapter, I show that exposure to negative information about a foreign company's business practices triggers public backlash in the U.S. This analysis includes conjoint and survey experiments, and observational studies using foreign investment data, firms' regulatory violations, news, surveys, and voting data. In the final empirical chapter, I investigate how labor laws in the Global North influence industrial relations between foreign companies and their workers and foreign investment policies. I argue that institutional tools like works councils, which promote cooperative industrial relations, boost local workers' support for foreign investments. My job market paper summarizes my findings in the US. | https://doeunkim.org/ |
| Max | Plithides | max.plithides@gmail.com | Security, Political Economy, Comparative Public (Defense) Policy, Methodology. | I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and an IGCC predoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. I received my M.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 2021 and my B.A. in Economics from Trinity University. My research interests broadly lie at the intersection of international security and political economy. To learn more about me or to contact me please visit my website at http://max-plithides.com. | Power Production Theory: A Political Economy Theory of Military Power | Dissertation: Security, Political Economy, Strategic Studies, Military Effectiveness, Military Constitution, Petrostates, Comparative Public (Defense) Policy Other Projects: Trade, Public Opinion, Affective Empathy, Emotions, Diplomacy, Political Psychology Methodology: Break Date Detection Algorithms, Multi-Conditional Maximum Likelihood Models, Sensitivity Analysis, Survey Experiments, AI-Generated Images, and Text as Data. | I have previously taught two courses, International Political Economy (twice) and Introduction to Research Methods as lead instructor. I also have previous teaching assistant experience covering: Introduction to International Relations, International Security, Arms Control, War and Peace, International Relations of the Middle East/China, Microeconomics for Public Policy, and Game Theory. | How do states produce military power? And can the production process help explain how states fight wars? In my dissertation, I argue that the design of a state’s military depends on its economic factor endowments. States differ in their abundance of land, labor (low and high-skill), and capital, which affects each factor's relative price. Thus, states build militaries that intensively use their abundant factor and use less of their scarce factor. Factor endowments also affect warfighting. Because it costs more to replace a good made with a scarce factor than an abundant one, enemy militaries target the other side’s scarce factor while protecting their own. This theory helps explain the wars countries choose to fight and how they choose to fight them. To test my argument, I use several types of newly collected data, including archival documents, original historical datasets, and ongoing Ukraine war data. I find that most states’ militaries do, indeed, rely heavily on the abundant factor of production and less on the scarce factor. Petrostates are the unique exception. These states can afford the exorbitant costs to constitute militaries dissimilar from their economies. Yet, by not utilizing their abundant factors, these states diminish their own military effectiveness. In addition, I find that states select military and civilian objectives for war plans based on comparative advantages, targeting their opponents' scarce factor and defending their own. My dissertation has substantial practical and theoretical implications for political and military science and policymaking. | http://max-plithides.com |
| Soonhong | Cho | tnsehdtm@gmail.com | Political Methodology, Causal Inference, American Politics, Public Opinion | I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA, where I am concurrently pursuing a Master’s degree in Statistics and Data Science. My research interest includes political methodology, causal inference, and public opinion. I am an affiliate at the Practical Causal Inference Lab and the Inequality Data Science Lab at UCLA. Before coming to UCLA, I received my MA in Political Science and BA in Economics and Political Science from Seoul National University. | Essays on Causal Inference for Political Science | My current research projects focus on developing methods for (1) estimating treatment effects in observational time series settings without suitable controls (Interrupted Time Series), (2) quantifying full uncertainty over counterfactual predictions vis Gaussian Process (GP) model, and (3) improving partial identification bounds when outcome of some units is endogenously non-existent. | Quantitative Methods at any level (Basic Statistics, Data Analysis, Regression, Causal Inference, etc.), Game Theory, American Politics | My dissertation includes three essays that introduce methodologies for addressing the challenges of making inferences from political science observational data. The first essay proposes a framework for causal inference in observational time series settings without suitable control. It estimates the time-specific treatment effects on the treated by contrasting post-treatment observed data with counterfactual forecasts informed by pre-treatment data. I formally define estimands, discuss identification assumptions and results, and propose two estimation tools: ARIMA model and Gaussian Process (GP) regression with combined kernels. I compare these to conventional ITS models via simulations and develop a placebo check to assess identification assumptions. I illustrate the proposed method with a simulation and political science applications. In the second essay (with Chad Hazlett and Doeun Kim), we explore the GP as a flexible regression approach for handling uncertainty in predicted counterfactual values. We provide an accessible explanation and an implementation suitable for social science inference problems, reducing user-chosen hyperparameters. We illustrate our approach in settings where conventional approaches struggle due to model-dependency or extrapolation in data-sparse regions, applying it to scenarios with poor covariate overlap, interrupted time series designs, and regression discontinuity. The third essay addresses the challenge of inherently missing outcomes in experimental or observational studies. I extend principal stratification strategies and develop new semiparametric estimators to improve non-parametric bounds. The proposed methodology incorporates machine learning tools to tighten often-wide non-parametric bounds using both discrete and continuous covariates. I conduct a simulation study to demonstrate performance and illustrate with social science studies. | https://soonhong-cho.github.io/ |
| First Name | Last Name | Contact Info | Subfield | Bio | Dissertation Title | Research Interests | Teaching Interests | Dissertation Summary | Personal Website Address |
