We are delighted to introduce the 2023-2024 fellows in the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.
We will welcome this twenty-third cohort of CSDP fellows to Princeton in the fall
2023-2024 CSDP Fellows
Masha Krupenkin is an Assistant Professor at Boston College. Her work focuses on attitudes toward race and inequality in American politics and utilizes computational social science methodologies to leverage the power of web search and media data to answer social science questions. Her book manuscript in progress focuses on how immigrants’ optimism about the United States shapes their racial attitudes.
Kyuwon Lee is a PhD Candidate in the Politics Department at New York University. In the summer of 2024, she will join the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of South California as an assistant professor. Her primary research interests are American political institutions and bureaucratic and interest group politics. Her dissertation consists of two overarching projects. The first project examines how executive agencies strategically adjust their policymaking in response to changing electoral landscapes. The second project addresses how the movement of personnel between the private sector and government agencies (i.e., “the bureaucratic revolving door”) affects bureaucratic performance and the political participation of interest groups.
Yphtach Lelkes is a scholar of public opinion, political communication, and political psychology. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Political Science department (secondary appointment) at the University of Pennsylvania. He co-directs the Polarization Research Lab and the Center for Information Networks and Democracy.
Lelkes' research focuses on political information and its impact on political attitudes and behaviors, with a particular emphasis on affective polarization. His work has been published in numerous prestigious journals in the fields of political science, communication, and psychology, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
His research has been widely covered in major national and international media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic.
Connor Phillips will earn his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2023. He studies parties, legislatures, and elections in the United States with a particular focus on the relationship between state and national politics. Specifically, Connor’s dissertation investigates how interest groups have shaped partisan polarization in US state politics, leveraging campaign contribution data and group ratings of state legislators to develop new measures of interest group activity and analyze the growth of polarization across different issue areas. His other research projects explore the impact of electoral rules on voters’ choices regarding party registration and turnout as well as how the ideological composition of state legislatures influences extremism among congressional candidates. At CSDP, Connor will continue to build on his dissertation work by examining which types of candidates receive interest group support and how these relationships vary between issue areas, across states, and over time.