About me

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Deparment of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). Beginning in Fall 2026, I will join the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi as an Assistant Professor of Political Science.

My research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, focusing on authoritarian politics, public diplomacy, political communication, and political psychology. Much of my work centers on China and U.S.–China relations, while it also extends to Europe and other cross-national contexts.

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. I am particularly interested in entertainment’s role in shaping political outcomes.

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

I adopt a multi-method approach to advance my research, including experiments, computational methods, design-based causal inference, qualitative content analysis, and interviews.

My research has been invited to R&R/conditionally accepted at the American Political Science Review and The Journal of Politics. It also earned several recognitions, including the Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper by a Graduate Student Award (MPSA 2025), the Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student 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). At WashU, I am the recipient of the Provost’s Graduate Student Research Excellence Award and the semifinalist of the Dean’s Graduate Student Research Excellence Award.

My work 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 and generously funded by the Ho & Ho Foundation and the Bai Xian Asia Insitute (BXAI).

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