Job Market Candidates

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
Doeun	Kim	doeun2@princeton.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 Public Backlash against Globalization in the United 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.	http://doeunkim.org/
Siyu	Liang	Sliang46@g.ucla.edu	Political Communication, Political Methodology, Comparative Politics, American Politics	Siyu Liang is a PhD candidate in Political Science and an MS student in Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research applies computational methods to study how media shape public opinion in the United States and China. Methodologically, she focuses on text analysis, natural language processing, and causal inference. She earned her BA in Political Science and Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021.	Unveiling Dissonance: Media Dynamics in Shaping U.S. and Chinese Public Perceptions	My research investigates how media shape public opinion in U.S.-China relations. I examine how authoritarian governments amplify China’s global image and how U.S. media construct threat narratives affecting foreign policy and intergroup relations. Methodologically, I advance text-as-data techniques, including stance detection and soft labeling, to improve measurement in political communication.	I am well prepared to teach courses in political psychology, public opinion, and political communication. I am also enthusiastic about offering methodology courses, ranging from introductory statistics and quantitative methods to advanced topics such as computational social science and text analysis.	My dissertation investigates how media influence shapes political opinions in both China and the United States. It addresses a central question: How do media affect public perceptions, foreign policy preferences, and intergroup attitudes across different political contexts? The first paper evaluates the effectiveness of foreign influencers as tools of Chinese soft propaganda. Drawing on survey experiments with nearly 4,800 respondents in both countries, I find that American audiences are significantly more persuaded by propaganda messages delivered by fellow Americans, while Chinese domestic audiences remain largely unaffected. These findings suggest that autocracies can build international support by leveraging foreign advocates, raising important questions about democratic resilience in the age of cross-border persuasion. The second paper examines how media threat framing influences both foreign policy attitudes and racial resentment. Using ten years of CNN and Fox News coverage, I show that both outlets increasingly framed China as a threat, though with partisan variation: Fox emphasized direct threats, while CNN highlighted indirect threats. A survey experiment with 3,000 Americans shows that both framings increase hawkish policy preferences and fuel anti-Asian sentiment, particularly among Republicans. The third paper develops methodological innovations in stance detection through transfer learning. Using U.S. media coverage of China, I demonstrate how models trained on one outlet can classify stances in others, addressing challenges of annotation subjectivity and data scarcity. Together, these studies illuminate the political consequences of media narratives and advance computational methods for studying polarized communication in international contexts.	https://www.siyuliang.com/
Graham	Straus	gpstraus@ucla.edu	American politics, Methodology, Elections, State and local politics, & Political behavior	I work with voter registration and turnout records to bring empirical rigor to longstanding theoretical questions in American Politics. My dissertation casts doubt on resource theories of political participation that argue individuals’ propensity to vote increases when they earn and have more money. Other areas of work include studying occupation of city councilmembers (in Urban Affairs Review) and studying public health messaging during the pandemic (in PNAS Nexus). I am originally from Evanston, IL. Before my PhD at UCLA I worked for a year at wikiHow.com after finishing undergrad at Brown.	“The Effect of Income on Turnout: Evidence from Public Salary Records and Administrative Voting Data”	My research examines the relationship between economic conditions, political behavior, and local governance in the United States. I combine innovative data collection methods with rigorous quantitative analysis to address fundamental questions in American politics. Examples include studying the turnout effects of poor health and income changes using original observational datasets.	I have taught Introduction to American Politics (lecture), A History of Political Data Analytics (seminar), and Graduate Math Camp (incoming PhD students). Additionally I have TA’d five quarters with courses ranging from the introductory undergraduate level to the graduate methods series.	How does income affect voting behavior? Existing work is clear: there is a large turnout gap between high- and low-income voters. A widely-held assumption derived from this between-person relationship is that changes in any given person’s income should cause a change in that same person’s political participation. Recent work has interrogated this assumption using within-person economic windfalls, however, and found no subsequent effects on turnout. Using public records requests for data on the salaries of public employees and other administrative data on over 570,000 people, I examine whether enduring changes to annual income between 2014 and 2020 affect political participation. The public employee data span everyone from custodial workers to college professors and cover a total of over 13,000 different occupations. I link the salary records to administrative data on voter registration and turnout to track within-person changes in income and participation over time. Results suggest that for a given person, changes in annual income correspond to extremely small changes in turnout. The effect is at most a fifth of the size of the gap illustrated in aggregate, cross-sectional designs between similar income levels. Data on salary trajectories within occupations suggests turnout patterns may be more a function of selection than individual economic incentives. These findings have implications for our understanding of what drives political participation as well as the types of policy interventions that might affect it.	https://www.grahamstraus.com/
Christopher	Palmisano	chpalmisano@ucla.edu	American Politics, REP, Methods	Christopher Palmisano is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UCLA. He studies how place and social context shape civic participation. His dissertation uses a movers design and data from nearly 20 million people to show that neighborhoods have a causal effect on voter turnout. His co-authored research on race and democratic norms has appeared in The ANNALS and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. He teaches courses in American politics, political behavior, and quantitative methods.	Moving to Vote: How Neighborhood Political Culture Shapes Voter Turnout	I study American political behavior with a focus on civic engagement and participation. My research uses large administrative datasets and quasi-experimental methods to examine how local contexts, such as neighborhoods and households, shape individual choices about voting and partisanship.	I am prepared to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics, political behavior, campaigns and elections, voting and representation, and quantitative methods.	Moving to Vote: How Neighborhood Political Culture Shapes Voter Turnout provides causally credible evidence that where people live affects whether they vote. To address residential sorting, I use a movers design validated in North Carolina administrative data and scaled nationwide to nearly 20 million movers. The design compares otherwise similar individuals—matched on demographics and pre-move voting histories—who originate in the same precinct but move to destinations with different turnout levels. High-dimensional fixed effects absorb stable individual differences and shared origin environments, isolating the influence of the new neighborhood. Moving to a high-turnout precinct increases the probability of voting by 2.1 points; moving to a low-turnout precinct decreases it by 2.7 points. This 4.8-point swing rivals many get-out-the-vote campaigns. Effects are largest for voters with weaker turnout histories, younger people, and racial and ethnic minorities, suggesting that residential mobility can widen participation gaps by creating pockets of civic advantage and disadvantage.	https://www.christopherpalmisano.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, the Inequality Data Science Lab and the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Before coming to UCLA, I received my MA in Political Science and BA in Economics and Political Science from Seoul National University.	Three Essays on Causal Inference under Real-World Complications	My current research projects focus on developing methods for (1) estimating treatment effects in observational time series settings without suitable controls (Interrupted Time Series) with Gaussian Process (GP) model, (2) quantifying full uncertainty over counterfactual predictions via GP model, and (3) improving partial identification bounds when outcomes of some units are 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 formalize this approach within the potential outcomes framework, derive identification results, and establish conditions under which pre-treatment patterns enable one to predict counterfactual outcomes. I employ Gaussian Processes (GP) as a flexible estimation tool under this framework, capturing complex temporal patterns through a flexible kernel specification. 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/
Claudia	Alegre	calegre6@ucla.edu	American Politics, Racial and Ethnic Politics, Political Psychology	As a proud daughter of Latino immigrants, I was born and raised in San Diego, California near the U.S.-Mexico border. My rich experiences growing up in a predominantly immigrant community shaped my research interests and my passion to pursue a doctoral degree. Outside of academia, I love spending time with my dog, Scooby. We spend our free time together exploring flea markets, thrift stores, and bakeries. During the weekend, you can find Scooby and I on our weekly coffee shop date!	A Different Feeling: How Collective Emotions Drive Political Reactions Among Marginalized Individuals	My research examines how emotional responses to discrimination shape the political behavior of marginalized communities in the United States. I am broadly interested in how these emotions influence participation, identity, and broader patterns of engagement in American politics.	I am interested in teaching courses on racial and ethnic politics, political psychology, American politics, and Latino politics. I am particularly interested in developing classes exploring race, identity, and inequality in American politics. Ultimately, my pedagogical approach to teaching is to create a learning environment where students feel empowered to ask questions and nurtured to find their own space in higher education.	My dissertation examines how group based threat and the emotions it generates shape political behavior among marginalized communities, with a particular focus on Latinos in the United States. I develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes between emotions experienced individually and emotions felt on behalf of one’s group. While anxiety at the individual level often discourages participation, group level anxiety can serve as a catalyst for political action. This distinction allows for a deeper understanding of when, how, and for whom collective emotions mobilize rather than demobilize. My work aims to show that marginalized communities can channel collective emotions into sustained forms of engagement, complicating assumptions that negative emotions only produce withdrawal or fragmentation. More broadly, my dissertation advances the study of racial and ethnic politics, Latino politics, and political psychology by urging the field to consider how both negative and positive emotions such as hope and pride shape political behavior. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced account of how marginalized groups navigate discrimination and build pathways toward political empowerment.	https://www.claudiaalegre.com/
Vanessa	Pooudomsak	vpooudomsak@g.ucla.edu	Political Theory, International Relations, International Law, Jurisprudence, International Legal Theory	Born and raised in Southern California, I moved north for my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, where I received a BA in Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies, and subsequently a JD from Santa Clara University School of Law. After passing the California Bar exam, I worked as a legal attaché at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. I returned to the states to pursue my LLM at NYU School of Law while working as a research assistant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights before entering UCLA for my graduate studies.	An Alternative Jurisprudence of International Law: Order in a Pluralistic Globe through and as Competition, Contestation, & Struggle	I work in international legal and political theory to reassess and reconceptualize our approaches to public international law and our notions of global community. With perspectives from political theories such as agonism, I explore the resilience and generativity of international law and its role in shaping the global community.	My research and experience have prepared me to teach international law-related courses both in international relations and political theory at the introductory and upper division levels. I am also prepared to teach introductory courses in political theory and international relations, and I have experience in teaching upper division political theory courses.	This dissertation proposes an alternative jurisprudence of international law in response to criticisms of international law (IL) as insufficient, ineffective, or even nonexistent. This jurisprudential theory proposes a different approach that aims to mediate, but not necessarily solve once and for all, the dynamic tensions that exist between community members. It restores dimensionality to IL, recognizing and affirming the plurality of both global actors’ motivations and the purposes of IL, diversifying reasons for engagement between actors, and channeling rather than eradicating tensions between actors into potentially beneficial and generative forms of competition, contestation, and struggle (CCS). Part of the project is a critical review of traditional approaches to IL in international relations and jurisprudence — approaches which primarily view IL as a means for resolving or eradicating CCS by moving global actors towards agreement and consensus. The CCS traditional approaches attempt to resolve or eradicate is reconceptualized as the very condition of possibility for IL’s success. The spaces, means, and reasons in and by which global entities engage in CCS keep the possibility of cooperation and consensus — markers of traditional “success” — alive. Moreover, this approach to IL provides better conditions for cultivating agonistic respect between entities, which can in turn lead to changes in the priorities, values, or even identities of the entities themselves. The generativity offered by this alternative jurisprudence enables not a static uniform global order of control, cooperation, and consensus, but a dynamic and vibrant order generated and sustained by and through CCS in IL.
Frank	Wyer	fwyer@sandiego.edu	International Relations; Comparative Politics	I received my PhD in Political Science from UCLA in June 2023, with concentrations in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Currently, I am a fellow with the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. My research, which has been published in International Organization and the British Journal of Political Science, explores how governments, civilians, and the international community respond to violent conflict and build peace in fragile states. I am an enthusiastic teacher with more than ten quarters of teaching experience, which includes multiple courses in international relations and research 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/
Anthony	Norton	adnorton266@ucla.edu	Political Theory, History of Political Thought, International Relations, International Law, Critical Human Rights Studies	Anthony Dean Norton recently completed his PhD in Political Science at UCLA (2024). His dissertation traces the conceptual history of peoples' right to self-determination, explaining modern conflicts through the sedimentation of competing meanings of collective autonomy. His research focuses on the contested meanings of collective self-determination and how historical interpretations shape contemporary political disputes. His research intervenes in debates across political theory, international relations, and intellectual history. He is currently developing his dissertation into a book manuscript. He holds an MA in Philosophy from Brandeis University and BA from The University of Texas at Austin.	Beyond Right and Recognition: Towards a History of Self-Determination as the Authorship of Collective Personhood	Collective Self-Determination, Decolonization, Theory and History of Human Rights, Global Justice, Minority and Indigenous Rights, Nationalism and Transnationalism, Environmental Justice	Global Justice, Human Rights, Public International Law, Nationalism & Cosmopolitanism, Ancient, Early Modern, Modern, and Late Modern Political Thought, Democratic Theory, International Relations Theory	The right to self-determination of peoples lies at the core of much global disquiet. Disputes over the meaning of the right for all peoples to "pursue their economic, social, and cultural development" fuel both protracted domestic conflicts and volatile interstate geopolitical crises. This dissertation recasts the conceptual history of collective self-determination focusing on two questions: who has the authority to define a "people" eligible for self-determination, and what physical and discursive spaces shape how self-determination can be realized. I term the answers to these questions the "authorship of collective personhood." The analysis reveals four distinct interpretations of self-determination. A national understanding, rooted in 19th-century European nationalism exemplified by Giuseppe Mazzini, views legitimacy as achieved in a nation's liberation from external domination through the attainment statehood. International self-determination, emerging in the early 20th century through the politics of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, involved external actors defining nation-states to align with their ideological and geopolitical interests. The global conception of the mid-20th century focused on decolonization through independent statehood, viewing the world through the lens of universal racial dynamics and colonial dependency. Finally, intrastate self-determination involves minority and indigenous peoples establishing political identity within existing states through negotiations over cultural self-governance. These competing interpretations explain why contemporary conflicts persist, as myriad stakeholders invoke historically grounded but contradictory understandings of their entitlements. Despite this complexity, I argue for embracing self-determination's inherent malleability, suggesting that this indeterminacy provides a resilient framework for addressing future challenges to collective identity and autonomy.
Alfredo	Trejo III	alfredotrejoam@ucla.edu	International Relations, Comparative Politics, International Political Economy, Public Policy	Alfredo Trejo III (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at UCLA. His research and teaching interests are in International Political Economy (IPE), exploring the relationship between activists, domestic politics, and international relations. His dissertation seeks to measure the impact of public demonstrations against trade agreements in Latin America, with a focus on Central America. Additionally, Alfredo studies the causes and consequences of migration, democratic backsliding, and the intersection between law, sexuality, and disease. Outside of academia, Alfredo is an award-winning filmmaker and has been dubbed as an Emerging LGBTQ Voice by Lambda Literary.	The Contentious Domestic Politics of Trade: The Impact of Public Demonstrations on the Trade Agreement Process in Latin America	My research interests are centered on 20th and 21st century socio-political and economic dynamics in Latin America, with a focus on preferential trade agreements, social movements, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. Additionally, I study the causes and consequences of migration, democratic backsliding, and the intersection between law, sexuality, and disease.	I am prepared to teach several courses, such as: Intro to International Relations; Intro to Comparative Politics; Social Movements; International Political Economy; Government and Politics in Latin America; Political Economy of Development; and International Migration. At UCLA I was the instructor of record for four classes and TA for five.	In The Contentious Domestic Politics of Trade, Trejo seeks to measure the impact of public demonstrations on trade policy outcomes in Latin America, with a focus on Central America. He takes a society-centered approach to international trade, which reasons that trade policies are formed by the demands of interest groups and how politicians respond to said demands. Trejo created an original data set of 92 unique trade agreements that include 17 Latin American countries from 1993 to 2021. Using quantitative methods, namely event history modeling, the data suggests that public demonstrations can have an impact on certain policy outcomes, such as the time it takes to ratify an agreement. Additionally, Trejo conducted semi-structured interviews with Costa Rican experts on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to elucidate why people protested against CAFTA, help contextualize what the anti-CAFTA campaign accomplished, and provides theories on why the movement “failed.” While previous IPE scholars have studied organized interest groups like firms and unions, fewer studies have examined non-economic interest groups, such as human rights advocates. Furthermore, earlier studies have focused largely on the perceived economic threat and the organizational infrastructure of previous campaigns to explain the anti-CAFTA movement. However, Trejo highlights how the moral economic dimension of CAFTA, along with distrust of the United States, fostered a sense of nationalism that activists were able to use to rally against foreign intrusion in domestic politics.	https://www.alfredotrejoiii.com/
Shing Hon	Lam	shinghon@ucla.edu	International relations, international political economy, Political Methodology, American Politics, Comparative Politics	Shing Hon Lam is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UCLA, specializing in international relations, and an M.S. student in Statistics. He holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a B.Soc.Sc. in Politics from the University of Hong Kong. His research examines international organizations, with publications in the Review of International Organizations, Global Policy, International Affairs, Journal of Global Security Studies, Lowy Institute Analyses, and the Washington Post. His dissertation investigates how trade disputes are negotiated and resolved within the WTO framework.	The Politics of Regulatory Trade Barriers	I study how international organizations—especially the UN and WTO—shape state behavior, using mixed methods from formal modeling and large-scale data analysis. My research focuses on institutional power, transparency, and signaling in global governance, with emphasis on China’s role, trade regulation, and evidentiary standards in enforcement.	I have taught international relations, international relations theory, and international law, as well as graduate regression analysis. My teaching interests include global governance, international institutions, quantitative methods, and game theory.		https://shinghon.github.io/
First Name	Last Name	Contact Info	Subfield	Bio	Dissertation Title	Research Interests	Teaching Interests	Dissertation Summary	Personal Website Address