Meet some of the recent or imminent UIUC Political Science PhDs currently searching for employment.
UIUC Job Market Candidates 2026
Rebeca J. Agosto Rosa
rja2@illinois.edu
Rebeca J. Agosto Rosa is a political psychologist studying how identity, group threat, and the media influence political attitudes and behavior. Her dissertation examines how the increasing salience of the Spanish language in mainstream U.S. media shapes intergroup attitudes, with a focus on news and advertising content. Her work is among the first to theorize that exposure to Spanish in non-political contexts can also shift outgroup attitudes and that language effects may vary along racial lines based on groups' relative position to Latinos/as on the racial hierarchy. Through a series of experiments, her research provides causal evidence that seeing or hearing the Spanish language in both political and non-political content shifts non-Latinos outgroup attitudes. By manipulating the media context (political, non-political) and the extent to which Spanish cues pose a communication barrier, her findings also shed light on the potential mechanisms driving the effects.
Committee: Cara Wong, Jeff Mondak, Aleks Ksiazkiewicz, Brian Gaines
Jane Betchley
janepb2@illinois.edu
My research is driven by an interest in how we can better conceptualize, measure, and therefore understand the individual differences that drive variation in political outcomes. My approach to this is centered on political psychology, in understanding how individuals think and feel about politics and wider society, to understand what drives a person to engage with politics in whatever form they do or do not. My primary disciplinary subfield of interest is political psychology, with a focus on information processing, and the conscious and subconscious cognitive processes it gives rise to which shape attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. My work is primarily focused on structural differences in cognitive architecture (autism), with related projects looking at typical cognitive variation such as partisan bias and attitude formation.
Committee: Aleks Ksiazkiewicz, Jeff Mondak, Tom Rudolph
Larissa Migotto Brandolt
larissa5@illinois.edu
My research examines comparative political behavior in Latin America, with a focus on local politics, polarization, and elite campaign strategy in Brazil. In particular, I study how municipal candidates use national political figures as campaign cues and how voters respond to these signals. Methodologically, I combine elite interviews, computational text analysis, and survey experiments.
Committee: Matthew Winters, Damarys Canache, Jeffery Mondak, JungHwan Yang (Communication)
Zachary Jablow
zjablow2@illinois.edu
I study American politics, political communication, and public opinion. My research is broadly focused on how politics is represented in mass media and perceived by ordinary people, and I have been particularly interested in public discourse and opinion on US wars. My dissertation research takes up this theme, investigating the legitimation of US foreign policy by pairing quantitative, observational public opinion data with in-depth interviews and news media content analyses. In recent decades, trust in government and the media have rapidly eroded; the legacy media have lost their near-monopoly on credible information and discourse; and people can now access far more information and a much wider range of political discourses in a diffuse, segmented communication environment. But I show in this project how vociferous debates over the wisdom of US wars belie broader commonsense, taken-for-granted narratives that continue to undergird the legitimacy of the US military apparatus, even as many Americans have grown increasingly disillusioned with their government’s wars. Related work of mine has been published in Media, War & Conflict and is forthcoming in Public Opinion Quarterly.
Committee: Scott Althaus, Tom Rudolph, Sam Frost, Don Casler, Emily Van Duyn (Communication)
Younghyun Lee
yl78@illinois.edu
My research examines how immigrants and minorities become politically incorporated into advanced democracies, with a focus on Europe. I take a minority-centered perspective, asking how immigrants themselves experience and navigate host societies — both through everyday interactions with native-born citizens and through the broader political context natives shape via parties, campaigns, and anti-immigrant rhetoric. My dissertation examines when positive contact with natives fosters immigrants' sense of belonging, political trust, and efficacy, and how hostile local contexts strengthen, weaken, or reverse these effects. Using geocoded survey data, in-depth interviews, and a survey experiment, I focus on Belgium and Germany.
Beyond the dissertation, my broader research agenda examines how political and social environments shape minority political behavior and democratic incorporation. I study how party competition, intergroup relations, and identity-based political cues influence immigrant voting behavior, cross-ethnic interaction, and perceptions of political inclusion. Situated at the intersection of comparative politics, political behavior, and political psychology, I use mixed methods including surveys, experiments, interviews, and text-as-data. My research has been published in Political Science Research and Methods and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Committee: Cara Wong (Chair), Matt Winters, Jake Bowers, Rana Khoury
Alesha Lewis
aleshal2@illinois.edu
I study political psychology and racial/ethnic politics in the United States. More specifically, I explore how racial trauma is linked to political attitudes and behaviors in African Americans. Racial trauma is a concept for which studies have been primarily relegated to psychology and health sciences. It describes the cumulative psychological, behavioral, and physical effects of long-term exposure to racism. While research in political science has long studied the political relevance of racism in various forms, few papers to date have demonstrated that chronic exposure to racism can produce a trauma response that is symptomatically similar to what one might expect from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Relying on both quantitative and qualitative research methods, I examine the following: what kinds of experiences may lead to a trauma response after an extended period of exposure, who is most vulnerable to racial trauma, whether racial trauma influences key political attitudes (e.g., efficacy) and political participation (e.g., voting), and the potential for political participation to be used as a coping tool.
Committee: Jeffery Mondak, Cara Wong, Rana Khoury, Jarrett Lewis (Psychology)
Matt Mettler
mettler3@illinois.edu
Matt Mettler is a scholar of American political behavior whose research explores how citizens navigate information environments, form political judgments, and fulfill their democratic roles. His dissertation examines how partisan identity, cognitive resources, and media cues shape perceptions of fact and opinion, offering insights into the erosion of shared empirical foundations in civil discourse. Beyond his dissertation, his research agenda spans several projects on misinformation, including work on conceptualizing and measuring the multidimensional structure of political information and misinformation, the use of linguistic markers of political falsehoods as an intervention for citizens to combat misinformation, biased political memory, and economic recollection and perceptions during election cycles. He has coauthored a book manuscript that provides a systematic account of how citizens justify their own policy preferences and whether they can articulate the best arguments for the opposing side, offering a novel perspective on the quality of democratic reasoning. His broader work investigates democratic backsliding, religious influences on political judgment, and individual perceptions of institutions, with particular attention to how experiences spill over across institutional domains and how institutional reforms shape symbolic and substantive representation. Mettler's research has been published in Misinformation Review, Politics & Religion, and Social Science Quarterly.
Committee: Jeffery Mondak, Damarys Canache, Brian Gaines, Tom Rudolph
Stephen Mullins
zeralesaar@gmail.com
My research explores the role that cognitive ability plays in mechanisms of political information processing, the individual-level outcomes of that processing, and its broader implications for citizen competence in democratic systems with a focus on the US. I seek to understand how cognitive ability, alongside more established factors such as knowledge and motivation, enables or obstructs average citizens' understanding of politics and capacity to
effective interact with and utilize their political information environments, especially when considering the unique, emerging challenges to citizens' understanding of politics through modern mass communication.
Committee: Jeff Mondak, Tom Rudolph, Aleks Ksiazkiewicz, Brian Gaines, Brian Gaines
Ikromjon Tuhtasunov
tuhtasu2@illinois.edu
My research examines how citizens evaluate political institutions and how state policies shape public perceptions of legitimacy and responsiveness. I focus in particular on how institutional reforms that expand opportunities for citizen participation influence state–citizen relationships. While participatory institutions are often associated with democratic governance, many authoritarian and hybrid regimes have increasingly adopted similar mechanisms in recent years. These reforms raise an important question: do participatory institutions meaningfully improve government accountability and legitimacy, or do they primarily serve to stabilize existing political systems?
My work addresses this question through research on participatory governance and political behavior in authoritarian contexts. I focus on Uzbekistan, where a nationwide participatory budgeting program was introduced in 2021 through the Open Budget platform. The program allows citizens to propose and vote on local development projects, such as infrastructure improvements, school repairs, and public services. Although the initiative resembles democratic innovations found in other political systems, it operates within a centralized political environment with limited political competition. This setting provides an opportunity to examine how citizens respond to new forms of institutional engagement under restrictive political conditions.
More broadly, my research investigates how direct interaction with public institutions shapes citizen attitudes toward the state. I examine whether participation influences perceptions of government competence, fairness, and responsiveness, and whether these effects persist as participatory institutions become routine features of governance. My findings suggest that participatory reforms can initially increase perceptions of responsiveness by making the state appear more attentive to citizen needs. Over time, however, these effects often weaken as citizens adjust expectations and evaluate institutions based on their long-term performance rather than initial reform signals.
Committee: Matt Winters, Jake Bowers, Damarys Canache, Avital Livny
Paul Un
paulun2@illinois.edu
I am an international relations and comparative politics scholar studying the political economy of development and bureaucratic politics, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. I employ multimethod research, including elite interviews, survey experiments, and archival research. My dissertation research explores how bureaucrats in foreign aid receiving countries compete with other government departments for aid dollars. Using data from extensive field research in Cambodia and Indonesia, I find that bureaucrats are often given a free hand to solicit potential donors and often compete for donors' attention. This competition has both negative and positive policy implications. A culture of competition means that cooperation between different government agencies can be difficult, impeding effective project implementation. At the same time, competition fosters an entrepreneurial culture, leading
bureaucrats to seek out new donors, and thus increasing overall aid inflows. My research aims to engage with policymakers and foreign aid practitioners, to bridge gaps between donor and recipient perspectives and improve development outcomes.
Committee: Matt Winters, Cleo O’Brien-Udry, Rana Khoury, Rob Carroll, Xinyuan Dai
Deli Yang
deliy2@illinois.edu
I study how countries move from hostility to peaceful relations. My dissertation examines when and how apology diplomacy helps address the legacies of conflict and political violence. I argue that conciliatory gestures can either promote or undermine reconciliation depending on how they are interpreted through the prior relationship between states, especially whether the states are rivals. I test this argument using newly compiled data on human-rights-related international transgressions, large-N analyses of bilateral relations, and original survey experiments. More broadly, my research examines (1) how unilateral conciliatory gestures shape conflict resolution, (2) how foreign publics evaluate public diplomacy, and (3) why rapprochement sometimes fails to consolidate into peace. My work has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, and a dissertation chapter based on this project has received a Revise & Resubmit.
Committee: Alyssa Prorok (Chair), Paul Diehl, Don Casler, Matthew Winters, Alexandra Chronopoulou (Statistics)