Mount St. Mary's University
My research explores the intersections of populism, political rhetoric, democratic governance, polarization, and extremism in both established and emerging democracies.
Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative approaches, I use text analysis and survey data to investigate the social and ideological foundations of political behavior.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in Political Science Research and Methods, Government and Opposition, Political Science Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. I have also published in regionally focused journals such as the Journal of East Asian Studies and the Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri.
Offers insight into the conditional nature of populism’s threat to democracy using data from South Korea’s 2024 martial law crisis.
Examines whether immigration contributes to the growth of populist discourse across advanced democracies.
Reveals that populist attitudes follow a distinct U-shaped curve across 43 democracies, thriving at the ideological edges.
Finds that American populist attitudes are overwhelmingly tied to conservative rather than progressive issue positions.
Using large language models on 52,000 party statements, reveals how both major Korean parties rely on sectarian populism.
Argues for a global framework integrating cyber and nuclear governance.
Analyzing World Values Survey data from 28 countries, showing that support for democracy has declined since the 2000s in non-Western democracies.
Uncovers that Americans hold two competing visions of citizenship, exclusive identity-based vs. inclusive civic-based.
Demonstrates that LLMs can match expert human coders in detecting populist discourse. [arXiv]
This project examines the levels of polarization among Korean citizens before and after political events.
This project leverages large language models to enrich the exploration of citizens’ responses to Most Important Problem (MIP) survey questions.
This study explores the influence of authoritarian attitudes on the support for populism, considering the relationship with satisfaction with democracy.
This study utilizes large language models to analyze policy acceptance by leveraging open-ended questions in the original dataset.
Using survey experiments, this research examines the political behaviors of Asian-American individuals.
This study employs the Mixed Subjects Design to strengthen inference in underpowered political science studies.
This study explores the dynamics of extreme right-wing ideology, focusing on South Korea.
This project analyzes communication patterns of extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing actors on YouTube, focusing on ideological framing and audience engagement using large language models.
Focusing on South Korea, this research investigates the impact of norm violations on the quality of democracy.
This paper analyzes military background scores from the LEAD dataset using Bayesian Mixed Factor Analysis.
"Ideology, Extremism, and Populism"
"Populism Meets AI: Advancing Populism Research with LLMs"
"Populism in Large Language Model Approach"
"Political Punitivism and Democratic Norm Violations"
"Populism in Comparative Perspective"
"Asian Populism"
I am always open to discussing research, collaboration, or academic inquiries.