I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interests focus on authoritarian nostalgia and related political behavior in post-authoritarian democracies, especially East Asian countries. My dissertation investigates why individual voters feel nostalgic for an authoritarian past and vote for political parties that are linked to the past. I explain the variation in authoritarian nostalgia with personality traits and external threat perception. I also show that authoritarian nostalgia is one of the key sources of social identity in maturing democracies, and people high in nostalgia are more likely to “vote for nostalgia”, support politicians and political parties evoking nostalgia. My dissertation research is supported by various sources, including a Taiwan Fellowship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Before joining the PhD program at Illinois, I received my BA in Political Science and Economics and an MA in Political Science from Korea University.