Lauren Young

Lauren Young Portrait

Position Title
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

665 Kerr Hall
Bio

About

Lauren Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She is a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and a Steering Committee member of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC IGCC. She co-runs the UC Davis Contentious Politics Lab with Juan Tellez. 

She studies political violence and collective action. Her main research agenda is on election violence, including how it affects voter behavior and how elites strategize and organize violent elections. She began this research in Zimbabwe. She is currently researching how contextual factors like party strength shape the causes and effects of election violence, and doing research with policy partners on how to prevent and mitigate its effects. Her second research agenda is on collective action after violent crime. This work, based primarily in Mexico, tries to explain when citizens demand punitive responses to crimes and when they mobilize around vigilante action.

She also advances research methods in two areas. First, much of her work uses information and communication technology like WhatsApp to collect data from hard-to-reach populations and run field experiments. Examples of some of her research using WhatsApp can be found here and here. Second, she is working to develop new methods to make research in violent contexts better adhere to the principles of research ethics. Some of her preliminary methods work on research ethics can be found here.

A copy of her CV is here.  

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