This study seeks to understand what factors most significantly contribute to democratic decline and whether these dynamics are observable in the United States. Existing literature pays limited attention to considering this process in the U.S., in part, due to an assumption of American exceptionalism. This study challenges that assumption by placing the U.S. in a comparative framework to assess how the mechanisms driving decline abroad may operate in the U.S. context. The primary mechanisms of interest in this analysis are executive overreach, measured by the weakening of judicial and legislative constraints, and polarization. A mixed-methods research design is employed, combining quantitative regression analysis with qualitative causal process tracing. The quantitative analysis identifies the variables most consistently associated with democratic decline, while the qualitative component evaluates how the mechanisms underlying these relationships operate in practice. The results indicate that executive overreach is most consistently associated with democratic decline, whereas polarization does not operate as an independent predictor. Comparative evidence illustrates that sustained democratic decline is associated with the weakening of oversight institutions, particularly the judiciary. These findings suggest that the United States is not immune to the forces that drive decline in other cases, but instead reflects an early-stage trajectory in which institutional constraints remain intact yet increasingly vulnerable.

This project examines how emerging forms of technolibertarian discourse shape (and are reshaped by) technology governance in California. While existing scholarship links ideology to the public statements of high-profile technology figures, far less attention has been paid to how such ideologies manifest within state-level political and regulatory environments. Focusing on California as both a policy innovator and the geographic center of the U.S. tech industry, this study investigates whether and how technolibertarian ideas, often framed in terms of innovation, decentralization, and regulatory skepticism, appear in public discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, antitrust schisms, and related issues. The project employs an over-time study using corpora of news articles. Search queries on LexisNexis are designed around key 3 key California hubs: Silicon Valley, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. The corpora are then analyzed using topic modeling, revealing recurring thematic markers in policy debates, such as: tensions between innovation and regulation, economic competitiveness, and risks to the public. The prevalence and distribution of such discourse is shown across a timeframe of the years 2020 to 2025, allowing for the analysis of post-COVID-19 pandemic discourse (2020-2022) in addition to the AI boom (2023-present). This study aims to assess whether technolibertarianism operates in practice as a coherent ideological force within California, or whether it is more of a rhetorical framework.

This paper examines K-pop not simply as a musical genre, as a vehicle of Korean soft power, but rather a transnational cultural economy. Tracing the evolution of K-pop from a localized cultural form to the current-day globally portable infrastructure, this study focuses on idol survival shows as a key cultural technology that exemplifies K-pop’s organizing logics. Intensive training regimes, competitive elimination formats, and affective labor are managed, standardized, and redeployed across national contexts — and are also received in tandem with local contexts. Methodologically, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of three survival programs: Produce 101 Season 1 (South Korea, 2016), Youth With You 2 (China, 2020), and The Debut: Dream Academy (United States, 2023). The analysis attempts to compare the contrasting operating premises within their distinct political economies, regulatory regimes, and ideological constraints. The paper argues that K-pop’s global success lies not in the consistent transmission of Korean cultural meaning, but in this ability to make Koreanness optional. As K-pop is deterritorialized, cultural meaning may no longer be intrinsically embedded, but produced relationally at the intersections between exported systems and receiving cultural lens. This shift redefines cultural power from shared interpretation towards infrastructural adaptability, and even suggests that contemporary cultural circulation operates not in spite of, but because of resistance, reinterpretation, and contestation.

This project examines whether increases in educational attainment among women are associated with stronger democratic attitudes among young people across countries. A commonly held assumption in political science is that expanding access to education strengthens support for democratic institutions and democratic values. However, my research has found mixed results regarding this assumption. My project investigates this question using cross-national survey data compared with education statistics. I use public opinion data from three different international surveys: the World Values Survey, Afrobarometer, and Arab Barometer. These surveys include questions that assess attitudes about democracy, such as support for democracy and rejection of authoritarian alternatives. I focus specifically on women aged 18-25 in order to study how changes in rates of educational attainment affect these values. To answer this question I use country-level upper-secondary completion rates for women from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics and examine countries that have seen significant increases in educational attainment over time. I then compare the values of different cohorts of young women before and after the change in educational attainment. To analyze if these changes correspond to shifts in democratic values, I run statistical models to control for economic factors, country differences, and year differences. The result has been no correlation.

Scholars of racial and ethnic political behavior still struggle to understand how age influences voter turnout, especially in recent Presidential elections. This study will use the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to examine the extent to which age influences voter turnout between Latino/a/x and white voters in the United States. The 2020 CMPS includes a large sample on adult hard-to-reach populations which allows researchers to disaggregate across age, race, ethnicity, nativity, and other variables of interest. This study accounts for the salience of socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics, immigrant experiences, and political mobilization as factors which influence voter turnout. I expect to find differences between voter turnout between Latino/a/x and white voters in the United States, especially amongst the youth age cohort.