About me

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Deparment of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU).

I study authoritarian politics, political communication, public diplomacy, and political methodology, with a regional expertise in China. Specifically, my research focuses on how authoritarian regimes use nuanced strategies of informaiton manipulation and and examine their effectiveness in securing individuals’ voluntary support and avoiding public backlash. My dissertation project looks at how authoritarian regimes leverage entertainment media, notably anti-corruption dramas and documentaries, to balance the need of revealing negative information while trying to convince citizens of its competence to address the exposed problems. In line with this agenda, I also investigate the political economy perspective of political compliance by looking at how state-led infrastructural development affects political trust in historically peripheral areas.

More broadly related to political communication, I also investigate the media strategies of radical right parties and how they affect their rise in Europe. Besides, another set of my reseach focuses on the short- and long-term effect of public diplomacy in affecting foreign public opinion, notably support for international cooperation.

Methodlogically, I adopt a multi-method approach, including survey experiments, field experiments, computational methods (text-as-data), and design-based causal inference.

Prior to my PhD journey, I enrolled in a Double Degree Program initiated and fully funded by the Bai Xian Asia Insitute (BXAI), where I obtained my Bachelor of Science in Global China Studies (GCS) from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Bachelor of Art in Economics from Waseda University in 2020.

Please feel free to reach me at weiye.deng@wustl.edu.