Welcome! I am a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in comparative politics and political methodology. Substantively, I study media and judicial capture in both democratic (U.S., Taiwan) and (mostly) autocratic (China, Hong Kong) contexts. I am also interested in authoritarian politics in general. Methodologically, I use econometrics, field and survey experiments, and computational methods (text-as-data) in my research. My work has been published in International Studies Quarterly.

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At WashU, I am affiliated with the Political Data Science Lab. I am also an Editorial Assistant for the American Political Science Review, and an Assistant for the Authoritarian Political Systems Group (APSG). In 2021, I was a Research Assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi. 

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You can follow me on Twitter @ruilinlai or email me at ruilin.lai@wustl.edu.