Graduate Student Affiliates of the Chicago Center on Democracy

Alejandro Sarria

Masters student, Computational Social Sciences

My main research area is how political actors behave in online spaces. Particularly, I’m interested in how language related to morality and emotion is used online by political elites to influence individual behavior toward certain outcomes like information spread, radicalization, hate campaigns an so on. My current work explores how language related to disgust is used to drive opposition against political leaders from ethnic minorities in Latin America.

Dipesh Singla

Masters student

I am a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing my Master’s at UChicago. My research focuses on housing insecurity within the realm of democracy. I am passionate about understanding democratic processes, civic engagement, and the impact of policy decisions on society. As a Graduate Student Affiliate, I look forward to contributing to meaningful discussions and advancing our collective understanding of democratic principles.

Eamon Doyle

Masters student, Social Sciences

As I prepare to enroll in the MAPSS program for the 2024-25 academic year, my intention is to begin laying the foundation for a long-term academic career dedicated to the study of liberalism in American life, American politics, and American grand strategy since the Second World War. More specifically, I’m intrigued by the prospect of leveraging historical insights from the Cold War and its aftermath to analyze major strategic challenges facing the U.S. model of liberal democracy today, including: (1) political polarization, (2) an increasingly fragmented and frenetic media environment, (3) the global resurgence of populism and authoritarianism over the past fifteen years, (4) the increasingly transnational scope of political events and movements, and (5) the increasingly central role of hybrid and nonlinear warfare in global politics and international relations. Ultimately, I hope that my research will produce insights that contribute to the development of a transnational grand strategy for the revitalization and defense of liberal democratic values in the twenty-first century.

Evan Park

Masters student, International Relations

My research focuses on the comparative democratization of the post-Soviet states. Particularly, I am interested in understanding why some of these states have introduced competitive elections and developed robust civil societies while others have experienced democratic backsliding or decided against democratization entirely. From an international relations perspective, my research seeks to understand how influential states such as the United States and Russia have impacted these developments and what this means for the future of democracy in the region.

Harrington Fan

Masters student, Computational Social Science

My research focuses on political violence and civil conflicts, with a particular interest in transitional justice and democratization in state-building. I explore questions such as which mechanisms of post-conflict reconciliation are most effective in different historical, cultural, and geographic contexts. I’m also eager to investigate broader puzzles, including what motivates inter-group violence and how the colonial legacy of identity formation influences democratization today. I plan to use computational methods, with a potential emphasis on geographical data, to support my research. I hold a B.A. in Political Science and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.

Hera Shakil

PhD student, Comparative Human Development

My research seeks to understand why growth in the middle-classes is correlated with a political culture of democratic backsliding in postcolonial global-south. Focusing on the case of present day India, I use a person centered, qualitative and bottom-up approach to understand how the Indian middle-classes develop and maintain their political cultures? What kind of political identities do they espouse and to what extent can these cultures be characterized anti-democratic? A secondary focus also aims to understand how individuals form political and ideological beliefs and how their relationship with nationalism, nationhood and geographical identity is shaped over time and what we can understand about individual political identity formation at the micro-level through these macro-level shifts in Indian politics.

Jade Joswick

Masters student, International Relations

My interests include the affects of social democracies on post-colonial states and democratic backsliding. Additionally, I am interested on discovering different sects to the democratic system that could be emplaced to improve the efficiency of the governmental system.

Joseph Epstein

Master of Arts in Social Sciences, Quantitative Methods and Social Analysis

My research focuses on developing formal models, supported by quantitative data, to understand how beliefs are substantiated. Specifically, I examine the criteria (or schema) individuals apply to determine whether information qualifies as evidence. While democracy depends on a plurality of voices, it also relies on a shared understanding of facts, which are ultimately shaped by individual notions of validity.

Kevin Angell

PhD student, Political Economy (Political Science and Harris School)

My research focusses on studying American political institutions at the national and subnational level, determining the impact of ordinary, non-political interactions on political processes, and seeking to develop new ways to measure and gather data on democratic activity. My current work examines the role in how government capacity impacts the success of democratic government in US states.

Nilesh Kavthekar

Masters student, Public Policy

My research interests lie in participatory democracy and the relationship between technology and democracy. Technological developments pose new risks to democratic participation (e.g. finely-targeted misinformation campaigns). On the other hand, new technologies (e.g. mediation and consensus-finding tools, polling techniques) can allow more people to access and participate in democratic institutions. I’m interested in understanding how to mitigate the risks and harness the benefits of technology to enhance democratic norms and institutions.

Silvia Fedi

PhD student, Political Science

Broadly, my research uses ancient Greek political throught to offer an alternative way to understand and theorize regime and regime types. I am particularly interested in how gynocracy – or rule by women – serves as the foil to ancient conceptions of democracy, and how theorizing through the ‘oddity’ of women ruling makes visible certain ways in which power operates within a state which we might take for granted or overlook when analyzing more familiar regime types.

Learn more about Silvia

Yang Xiang

Doctoral student, Sociology

My interest is in democratic backsliding in a decentered globalism. My research focuses not only on the institutional, structural and cultural origin of de-democratization, but also studies how the crisis-talk of liberal democracy makes sense and shifts in sequences of events, from the beginning of the third wave to today. My overarching goal is processualizing and historicizing democratization.

Zachary Miranda

Masters student, Computer Science

My research uses natural language processing to explore the intersection of language and democratic erosion. Specifically, I am developing computational methods that draw on real-time news and structured event databases to identify, rank, and classify episodes of democratic erosion and their relation to authoritarianism. By identifying the language used in describing these events and how it changes over time, these methods allow us to monitor erosion as it happens. The resulting data produce a detailed historical record of erosion events, making it possible to analyze democratic decline over time at a finer granularity.