About me

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Deparment of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). I am on the 2025-26 job market.

My research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, and focuses on authoritarian politics, public diplomacy, political communication, and political psychology.

Specifically, I investigate how political elites use communication and development strategies to overcome public skepticism and build support for their rule and policies in both domestic and international environments. My job market paper, which serves as the foundation for a book project, answers this question by examining how the Chinese regime responds to revelations of widespread corruption through the strategic use of entertainment — a largely understudied dimension of the media landscape — to design engaging stories that weave detailed depictions of governmental failures with positive portrayals of reform and progress for persuasion.

"China's political environment today is that the top leader has almost absolute power."
— In the Name of the People (2017)

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

My research has been invited to R&R at The Journal of Politics and has earned several recognitions, including the Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Paper Award (APSA 2024), the Rebecca Morton Poster Award (NYU Rebecca B. Morton Conference on Experimental Political Science 2025), and the Best Paper Award for the Foreign Policy Section (APSA 2022). It has also been generously supported by multiple institutions, including the APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) Program, the Institute of Human Studies, and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

Prior to my PhD journey, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Global China Studies (GCS) from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and a Bachelor of Art in Economics from Waseda University in 2020. My undergraduate study was fully funded by the Ho & Ho Foundation and the Bai Xian Asia Insitute (BXAI).

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