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.

Braeden Davis (PhD candidate) and Yu-Shiuan Huang (UCD PhD 2025) recently published a research note in Electoral Studies, titled “Happy and Glorious? The Sometimes-Unifying Effects of the British Monarchy.” In this study, they ask: “Do monarchs unify?” Using two waves of survey experiments in the UK, they find that priming people to think positively about the monarchy increases national pride and indirectly reduces affective polarization. Interestingly, this effect only appears when polarization is measured by social distance, not feeling thermometers.

Graduating senior Benicio De Palm (who majored in Political Science Public Service) was featured in the latest issue of Explorations: The UC Davis Undergraduate Research Journal, which highlights original work from students across disciplines. Benicio's research article, "The Effects of Post-Communist Democratization on Sporting Success in Eastern Europe" was supported by Professor Jo Andrews. Check it out here!

It is with great joy that we announce the successful endowment of the Walter J. Stone Graduate Summer Fellowship. Professor Stone only recently learned of the endowment, and he received the news with his trademark humility. The endowment is a fitting way to commemorate his extraordinary contributions to our field and to so many of us personally. The endowment will pay for a summer stipend for at least one UC Davis Political Science graduate student, allowing the student to focus on their research over the summer. 

RyuGyung Park (UCD PhD 2025) recently published an article in International Interactions, titled "Is trade the enemy of environment?: Congressional voting on environmental policies after the China shock".  In this article, Park asks "how does a sudden increase in imports affect support for environmental policies?" While many perceive international trade as the enemy of the environment, she finds some evidence that an increase in imports weaken dirty industries insofar as it opens up room for more pro-environmental votes in the US Congress.

Three UC Davis Political Science affiliates published research in a new edited volume on political institutions. Associate Professor Lauren Young and PhD candidate Enrico La Viña published a chapter in the Handbook of Innovations in Political Psychology. The chapter, entitled "Experiments in and on political institutions", explains how experiments can be used to both describe institutions and identify the effects of institutional changes and discusses the potential and pitfalls of common experimental designs.

Anissa Joseph (PhD candidate) and Professor Juan Tellez, along with co-author Nura Sedqie, recently published an article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, titled "Who Should Benefit from Group-Based Quotas? Experimental Evidence from Brazil". Group-based quotas and affirmative action policies are common in many parts of the world. A large literature has focused on public debates over the perceived fairness of these policies. Joseph et al.