Research

Graduate Fellows

Matteo Bertoli

Matteo Bertoli is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. He studies comparative politics, political methodology, and formal theory. His research focuses on political polarization and extremism, using text analysis and causal inference. As part of his fellowship, he examines how political extremism and populism become self-reinforcing.

Alice Brocheux

Alice Brocheux is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Rochester. She studies comparative politics, with a focus on trust in institutions and collective memory. She is also interested in the role of elite actors in enabling or preventing democratic backsliding. Her methodological focus is on survey experiments.

Alexsandra Cavalcanti

Alexsandra Cavalcanti is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Rochester. She holds an MSc in Political Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. Her research interests include institutions, distributive politics, development economics, and research methods. Her current project examines how control institutions influence public policy outcomes by shaping incentives for corruption control.

Josiah Rath

Josiah Rath is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. He studies international relations, comparative politics, and formal theory. His work focuses on conflict and social norms across democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on the comparative politics of developing democracies, with a particular emphasis on Latin America and Mexico. As a Democracy Center Graduate Fellow, he will examine the ways in which national politics and local politics are intertwined in developing countries.

Bahar Zafer

Bahar Zafer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester, specializing in comparative politics and empirical and computational methods. Her research examines various dynamics of media capture in the context of democratic erosion. As a Democracy Center Graduate fellow, she will study how incumbents manipulate state resources to undermine the financial independence of the free press and influence media coverage.

Xingyu Zhou

Xingyu Zhou is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. His work spans both theoretical models of political control in authoritarian regimes and empirical applications of these models in China. As a Democracy Center Graduate Fellow, he will study the effectiveness of centralized and decentralized propaganda.

Alessio Albarello

Alessio Albarello is a former Democracy Center graduate fellow. He studies comparative politics, with a focus on electoral behavior, policymaking processes, democratic representation, and applied methodology. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore.

Oliver Sun

Oliver Sun is a former Democracy Center Graduate Fellow. He studies political socialization, political psychology, and public opinion in China. He is currently an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago.