Assistant Professor of Political Science
Mount St. Mary's University
Dr. Jung studies political behavior and political communication in established and emerging democracies, with particular attention to populism, democratic norms, and the language of politics. She works with large language models to analyze political rhetoric and open-ended survey responses.
Political Behavior · Political Communication · Democratic Norms · Large Language Models
Across established and emerging democracies, Dr. Jung studies how citizens form political judgments and how political communication shapes them. Her work examines populist appeals, partisan identity, and the norms that hold democracies together, and how each takes shape in the language of politics. Running alongside it is a methodological interest in computational approaches to political text, using large language models to analyze political rhetoric and open-ended survey responses.
Her research has been published in Political Science Research and Methods, Government and Opposition, Political Science Quarterly, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and the International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age, with additional work currently under revise and resubmit at Political Psychology. Her current book project, Populism in East Asia, investigates how populist politics develops across the region and how its political expressions are shaped by distinct historical, ideological, and institutional contexts.
Her research has been presented at major scholarly venues, including the Frontiers in Empirical Research on East Asia (FEREA) held at New York University, the APSA Political Psychology Pre-Conference held at Harvard University, the DMV Workshop in Empirical Political Science (DMV-WEPS) held at George Washington University, the Norms and Behavioral Change Conference (NoBeC) held at the University of Pennsylvania, the NEKST Conference held at the University of Michigan, and the Workshop on the Political and Governance Dimensions of AI-Enabled Cybercrime convened by American University and EADA Business School. She is a recipient of the American Political Science Association's Michael Brintnall Teaching and Learning Award, the Missouri Excellence in Political Science Teaching Award, and the University of Missouri's GPC Excellence in Teaching Award.
She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri in 2024. She earned an M.A. in International Politics and a B.A. in Policy Studies, summa cum laude, from Hanyang University in South Korea.
Political Science Research & Methods
A U-shaped relationship between ideology and populist attitudes across 43 democracies.
doi:10.1017/psrm.2025.10045Government and Opposition
Right-leaning populists endorsed South Korea's 2024 martial law; left-leaning populists opposed it.
doi:10.1017/gov.2026.10032Journal of East Asian Studies
LLM analysis of 52,487 party statements finds populist rhetoric rising and mostly sectarian.
doi:10.1017/jea.2025.13