Governance / Democracy

Research Interest

Susan Hyde

Professor
Political Science
Center on the Politics of Development

Susan D. Hyde is the Robson Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley, where she was Chair of the Department of Political Science (AY 2021-2024) and is co-director of the Institute of International Studies (2021- ). She studies international...

Andrew Little

Associate Professor
Political Science

Andrew Little is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies authoritarian politics, communication and information manipulation, and conflict, exploring the causes and political consequences of "nonstandard" belief formation with the use of formal models.

Mark Danner

Professor
Graduate School of Journalism
English

Professor Mark Danner is longtime journalist and writer who holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching in both the Graduate School of Journalism and the Department of English. He writes about political violence, war, and American politics, mostly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and teaches courses in foreign and war reporting and the realist and modernist novel.

Abhay Aneja

Professor
Law

Abhay Aneja is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies how legal institutions shape social and economic inequality, from domestic and comparative perspectives, with a focus on the law of democracy and criminal justice.

Pol Fité Matamoros

Graduate Student
Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
Pol Fité Matamoros is pursuing a PhD in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, as recipient of the Regent’s Fellowship. His research explores fascism as a spatial matter—i.e. as not only deploying certain spatial tactics, but also as premised on certain spatial imaginaries—through the case of early 20th century Spain. Its key contention is that exploring fascism through a spatial lens illuminates the links between European imperialism and fascism that are hinted at when calling the latter “the boomerang effect of...

Elena Chachko

Assistant Professor of Law
Berkeley Law
Elena Chachko is an Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law School. She was the inaugural Rappaport Fellow at Harvard Law School. Motivated by experience in diplomacy and intelligence analysis, Professor Chachko’s research explores the intersection of law and geopolitics. Her recent projects study international cooperation in the administrative state, how agencies engage with international norms and practices in domestic regulation, the emergency governance of domestic and international institutions, the security and geopolitical aspects of tech governance, national security in economic...

Soo Sun You

Graduate Student
Political Science

Soo Sun You is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on comparative politics and political behavior. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economic and political inequality and development and studies how political institutions affect levels of perceived economic inequality and political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Soo Sun worked as a Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) research fellow in Ethiopia, implementing and analyzing the impact of women’s empowerment programs. She also worked as...

Ritika Goel

Graduate Student
Political Science

Ritika Goel is a PHD candidate in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. She studies comparative political economy, focusing on democratic accountability, inequality and, upward redistribution and populism.

Otto Kienitz

Graduate Student
Political Science

Otto Kienitz is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on autocratic institutions in comparative perspective ranging from Europe to imperial and post-Soviet Eurasia. His dissertation explores the relationship between local self-government and state capacity in Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and China. He is the co-founder of the Berkeley Historical Social Science Workshop and concentrates on the role of local political economy in autocratic state-building.

Kienitz is a recipient of the 2021...

Rachel Fisher

Graduate Student
Political Science

Rachel Fisher is pursuing her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on comparative politics and political behavior, including candidate ambition and recruitment, international development, and policy evaluation. She employs experimental methods to study gender differences in political participation.

Fisher is the recipient of the 2021 IIS Simpson Research Grant.