Hire a Rochester PhD
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2026 Job Market Candidates
Theu Dinh
Field(s): American Politics, Political Methodology
Committee (advisor in italics):Lawrence Rothenberg, Anderson Frey, Dan Alexander, Dustin Tingley
I study American Politics using empirical methods. My dissertation makes use of large language models and causal inference methods to study the effects of experiences and electoral institutions on American political behaviors. My first dissertation project, which is co-authored with Lawrence Rothenberg, uses micro-level data to examine the effects of experiencing extreme weather events – the primary way in which most humans experience climate change (US Global Change Research Program, 2014) – on the public’s support for climate change mitigation policies. My second project studies the effects of electoral institutions on the level of ideological content and extremism in politicians’ rhetoric. In particular, I study whether laws that mandate more inclusive primary elections have led to moderation in US House Members’ rhetoric. My third project identifies the effects of climate change adaptation policy making on politicians’ climate attitudes. Specifically, I study whether the amount of adaptation effort exerted by city governments affected nearby politicians’ expressed belief and doubt about climate change science, and their support for climate change mitigation policies.
Adam Roberts
Field(s): Comparative Politics, Methods
Committee (advisor in italics):Gretchen Helmke, Anderson Frey, Scott Abramson, Sergio Montero
My dissertation examines how voters process information about incumbents and how the performance of local governments travels across electoral boundaries to shape political behavior. My job market paper, "Beyond Borders: How Voters Process Information about Incumbents," investigates how voters gather and use information about incumbent performance to hold them accountable. My second dissertation paper, "Overcoming Inexperience: How the Opposition Wins in Competitive Authoritarian Systems" (under review), shows evidence that governance information spreads across electoral borders and that opposition parties are not perceived equally in competitive authoritarian systems. My third dissertation paper, co-authored with Dot Sawler, uses a large-scale survey experiment to study how voters explain candidates' electoral wins and losses. In particular, we examine whether they attribute a woman's defeat to her sex, and whether such "biological" attributions are distinct in magnitude and structure from attributions rooted in ethnicity or in non-biological identities such as religion.
Matteo Bertoli
Field(s): Comparative Politics, Methods
Committee (advisor in italics):Alexander Lee, Bonnie Meguid, Curtis Signorino, Alexander Lee, Bonnie M. Meguid, Curtis S. Signorino, Anderson Frey
My research centers on the rise of political extremism and populism in modern democracies. I study what happens once extremist and populist politicians win power and what institutional and material conditions shape their emergence in the first place. My job market paper, “Extremism Is Self-Undermining, but Populism Is Not,” separates extreme-right ideology from populist rhetoric and uses Italian mayoral platforms and close elections to estimate their consequences in office. The paper applies established politician-characteristic regression discontinuity designs and develops a continuous-treatment extension. I show that the two traits produce sharply different governing and electoral consequences: extreme-right mayors retrench welfare and generate electoral backlash, whereas populist mayors tend to expand visible welfare when reelection incentives remain and face no comparable punishment. Treating the two traits as a single category obscures these differences. My second project, “Paying for Moderation,” shows that higher mayoral salaries in Brazil reduce the share of extreme-right candidates and elected mayors. A third project, co-authored with Alexander Lee and Anil Menon, examines how fiscal pressure and political competition contributed to the emergence of a modern professional bureaucracy in Britain.
Dot Sawler
Field(s): Methods, American Politics
Committee (advisor in italics):Jamie Druckman, Mayya Komisarchik, Scott Abramson, Scott Tyson
My research agenda centers on inter-group relations in political settings. A defining and differentiating characteristic of my work is the development and incorporation of new approaches to survey measurement and design that enable me to advance knowledge on group relations in politics. My dissertation examines how Americans form beliefs about political groups and the consequences of misperceptions for polarization, trust, and policy judgments. Across three papers, I investigate when citizens stereotype political groups, how those (mis)perceptions influence attitudes toward partisan opponents, and how stereotypes shape evaluations of individuals. Methodologically, my dissertation combines novel survey experiments, skin-in-the-game behavioral measurements, and experimental approaches to studying stereotypes. Together, these papers add to our understanding of how to reduce inter-group hostility by isolating the kinds of beliefs that drive stereotypical thinking, dislike, and distrust. Building on my dissertation’s focus on belief elicitation, my other work develops new methods for measuring trust in both social relationships and democratic institutions. This agenda is motivated by a simple challenge: while trust is widely recognized as fundamental to democratic governance and social cooperation, existing measures often conflate distinct psychological mechanisms and therefore obfuscate the mechanisms by which trust is formed. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics and PNAS: Nexus.
Kevin Wu
Field(s): Comparative Politics, American Politics, Methods
Committee (advisor in italics):Bonnie Meguid, Alexander Lee, Anderson Frey
My research asks how institutions allocate political power, determining who enters office, who advances within it, and who captures the benefits they distribute. Parties, politicians, and firms anticipate these rules and act on them well before the allocation is made. My job market paper, Win for Women or Dynasties? Consequences of Gender Quotas in Taiwan, advances a supply-side theory of quota effects. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that activating an additional reserved seat raises both women's descriptive representation and the dynastic share of local councilors. This increase is driven by party nomination strategy rather than by the mechanical effect of the reserved seat. Constrained to field women, parties turn to those whose family ties already supply name recognition. Conventional expectations would have this shift flatten or reverse substantive representation, since dynastic women are cast as placeholders for their male relatives. I find the opposite. Quota exposure produces more women-related bills and floor speeches, and dynastic women are no less engaged than other women. The gain even spills over onto men, though it is attenuated among dynastic men. My American politics research studies the role of money in Congress. I show that members convert contributions to their own party into more powerful leadership positions, and that lobbying operates earlier than existing work has recognized, shaping the statutory categories that determine which firms will later qualify for subsidies. My research has appeared in Congress and the Presidency.
Jefferson Leal
Field(s): Comparative Politics, Political Methodology
Committee (advisor in italics):Anderson Frey, Gretchen Helmke, Alexander Lee
My dissertation chapter “Local Right-Wing Populism and Vaccination” examines whether populist rhetoric has consequences for local policy provision. I use supervised machine learning and a close-election regression discontinuity design to show that Brazilian municipalities governed by populist mayors experienced lower and delayed COVID-19 vaccination coverage. These effects are not driven by party ideology or federal alignment, indicating that populist rhetoric can distort public policies even in a context with a strong public health system and high trust in vaccines. In my paper “When Crisis Hits, Does Experience Matter?” (co-authored with Anderson Frey), we show that political executive experience acquired by learning-by-doing in executive office improves public policy delivery, especially during crisis. We show that experienced mayors have higher COVID-19 vaccination coverage and lower mortality than newcomers, and we rule out alternative mechanisms such as bureaucratic turnover. In addition to these substantive projects, my methodological research develops an item response theory model to measure ideology from political texts using text embeddings and machine learning to model sentence-level topics and stance. I apply this method to more than 21 thousand campaign platforms from US House elections and Brazilian mayoral races. By design, the method is highly interpretable in terms of which issues divide the political spectrum in terms of salience or stance. I also show that the method is able to reliably recover ideal points even when word choice is not polarized.
Bahar Zafer
Fields: Comparative Politics, Political Methodology
Committee (advisor in italics): Scott Abramson, Curtis S. Signorino, Tasos Kalandrakis, Sergio Montero
My dissertation project combines modern causal inference techniques with computational methods to examine how media capture unfolds during Turkey's sustained period of democratic backsliding under the AKP, alongside major shifts in media ownership. The first chapter provides evidence of government manipulation of state advertising between 2015 and 2020, showing that state-owned advertisers favored politically connected outlets rather than targeting audiences, unlike private enterprises advertising similar products. The second chapter draws on a large corpus of news coverage parsed from Common Crawl’s repository of web crawls and analyzes how economic news reporting changes when outlets are acquired by politically connected conglomerates. To analyze millions of unstructured Web ARChive files crawled from news websites, I develop an automated topic classification pipeline by training BERT-based classifiers on website sections, thereby eliminating the need for manual topic annotation. I find strong evidence of positivity bias in pro-government outlets when reporting on the Turkish economy, consistent with theories that economic performance shapes electoral support for incumbents. The third chapter investigates news selection strategies using Structural Topic Modeling, analyzing how topic prevalence varies in response to important events and media owners. I show that pro-government and opposition-leaning media differ substantively in their baseline topic selection and responses to important events, exposing readers to systematically different information environments. Beyond my dissertation, I have a co-authored project with Scott Abramson that evaluates the robustness of causal estimands in conjoint experiments to small changes in respondent samples and experimentally generated contests.