Professor Brandon Kinne and PhD candidate Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen have published an article in the Journal of Conflict Research testing a theory of how reciprocity in international relations affects the beliefs and attitudes of individual citizens. This study uses the theoretical framework of Unbounded Generalized Reciprocity, where reciprocity operates as an informational shortcut about the trustworthiness of others, to understand how people interpret situations where countries return favors, or fail to.

Assistant Professor Tye Rush has published a new article published in Political Research Quarterly that examines whether mistrust in American elections extends beyond white conservatives to racial and ethnic minority groups. Using an original national survey and data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (2012–2022), Rush and his coauthors find that Black and Native American respondents express significantly lower trust in electoral integrity than white Americans.

We are thrilled to share that incoming PhD student Laila Waddell, who earned her BA from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in December 2024, has won the prestigious Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. The Cota-Robles is named after one of the first Mexican-American professors in the UC system and provides full tuition and fees plus a living stipend for the first two years of a PhD. Laila plans to continue to research the intersection of environmental justice and urban planning in disenfranchised communities during her PhD in political science.  

Alex Cohen, a graduate student in our PhD program, has accepted a postdoctoral position as a voting law scholar with the Democracy Policy Lab at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP). In this full-time, mentored research appointment, Alex will contribute to the nationally recognized Voting Laws Roundup—a partnership between Berkeley’s GSPP and the Brennan Center for Justice that tracks state-level legislation affecting the right to vote.

Haley Daarstad was awarded $15,000 through the APSA doctoral dissertation research improvement grant (DDRIG) to support her research on criminal violence during elections in Mexico. Her dissertation explores how women and men experience and impact criminal violence differently at various stages of the electoral process in Mexico. 

Since 2016, governments in 77 countries have imposed more than 1,100 internet shutdowns, a tactic increasingly used under the banner of “digital repression.” A new Journal of Peach Research study by recent UC Davis PhD graduate Marika Miner focusing on India—the global leader in shutdowns—finds that these blackouts are not applied evenly in response to security threats, as officials often claim. Instead, they disproportionately target regions with lower ruling party support, follow incidents of opposition violence, and precede spikes in military action.

A new study in Political Analysis by recent PhD graduate Jonathan Colner, now an assistant professor at American University, introduces a practical workflow for using free large language and object detection models to extract structured political data from poorly formatted sources. While political scientists often rely on optical character recognition, regular expressions, or labor-intensive hand-coding, the method described in the article streamlines the process—requiring only a small number of hand-labeled examples to train effectively.

Recent PhD graduate Ryugyung (Rio) Park published an article analyzing the strengths and limitations of the WTO in addressing environmental challenges related to trade. Park, now an assistant professor of Government at William and Mary, and her coauthor analyze text data from several WTO forums to come to their conclusions. They offer suggestions for how to reform the WTO for an era of climate change. 

Assistant Professor Hanno Hilbig and coauthors published an article this June in the journal Comparative Political Studies (CPS) on authoritarian responsiveness using innovative data on housing petitions and construction in the German Democratic Republic. Their findings indicate that the GDR was responsive to citizen petitions for housing, targeting housing construction on regions with more petitions. Their results suggest that even highly autocratic regimes can be responsive to citizen demands under some circumstances. 

The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) has named Alice Malmberg as one of six recipients of its 2025 Early-Career Research Fellowship. Alice earned the honor with a research proposal that leverages large language models to simulate human decision-making in conjoint choice experiments, a technique poised to broaden the methodological toolkit available to experimentalists while sharply reducing data-collection costs.