The following FSU graduate students are currently seeking academic positions:
Austin Cutler
Austin Cutler is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University and Research Fellow for the LeRoy Collins Institute. His research focuses on political behavior, public opinion, and partisan polarization using observational and experimental methods. His dissertation examines the social identity foundations for people’s policy opinions, utilizing several original survey experiments of U.S. residents. In general, his dissertation finds that the social groups that support policies influence people’s own policy opinions, and that in particular how people feel towards their own group influences their policy positions. These findings generalize to several policy areas, including gun control and immigration, although there is some variation between policy areas. His work with the LeRoy Collins Institute focuses on policy outcomes, specifically on examining the best practices for transparency in elections, by building interactive data dashboards displaying election audit data and ballot images. He currently has several papers under review at top political science journals, including a revise and resubmit at The Journal of Politics (with Matthew Pietryka and Carlisle Rainey). He teaches several workshops on using the statistical software R for social science research and Understanding Political Science Research. He also has experience teaching the intro to American Politics, and Political Psychology courses as a TA.
Marli Dunietz
Marli Dunietz is a scholar of behavioral political economy who studies American political behavior using theory-driven experiments. Her job market paper examines how media partisanship, and hence, beliefs about the political alignment of the news media’s audience, shapes whether uninformed voters decide to abstain or guess in elections. In the paper, she develops a formal model and demonstrates experimentally that, when uninformed, disaffected voters strategically guess, revealing new explanations for down-ballot participation gaps. Other working papers in her dissertation investigate citizens’ mental models about whether others’ partisanship drives policy preferences or vice versa, and how social rewards and sanctions shape political communication and the interpretation of reticence in group discussions. In work outside her dissertation, she examines how people interpret partisan consensus and disagreement by elites in Congress: partisan consensus indicates policy quality rather than compromise, which suggests that citizens have a mental model in which elite policy support depends on a combination of valence and particularistic concerns. Across her research, she uses theory-driven lab, survey, and field experiments, complemented with observational data, to understand the beliefs and meta-beliefs that shape political decision-making.
Chris Gahagan
Chris Gahagan is a PhD candidate and one of three nationwide recipients of APSA’s 2024 Francis Rosenbluth Junior Scholar award in Political Economy. His primary research focuses on how international agreements impact domestic economic outcomes, with a particular focus on labor rights and workers in the informal economy. Recent work from this research agenda has been conditionally accepted in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) as well as earning him a plenary slot at the Political Economy of International Organization (PEIO) annual conference. A second strand of Chris’ research explores individual trade preferences, the rise of populist-nativist opposition to trade, and its impact on the embedded liberalism compromise and future U.S. trade policy. Work from this research agenda includes a publication in Politics and Governance (2023), as well as a paper utilizing survey experimental methods currently under review. Chris has experience teaching multiple undergraduate political science courses, has refereed for multiple academic journals, and performs one-on-one mentoring to students engaging in political science research through FSU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity
Program (UROP).
Martín Gandur
Martín Gandur is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University studying comparative political institutions, with particular interest in courts and the separation of powers in environments characterized by hostile interbranch politics. He has regional expertise in Latin America, but his research also considers interpower relations across different institutional and political contexts. Martín’s three-essay dissertation project focuses on Argentina to study how specific instances of interpower conflict shape citizens’ attitudes about checks-and-balances institutions such as independent courts. His essays levering experimental data and case studies to examine the conditions under which judicial checks foster public support for independent decision-making and democratic checks and balances. Martín’s second dissertation essay won the 2025 Neal Tate Award and is forthcoming at the British Journal of Political Science. He has also published an article in the Journal of Law and Courts and two book chapters, and part of his research agenda is currently under review. At FSU, he teaches courses on comparative political institutions, public law, and research methods.
James ‘Jay’ C. Stewart
James ‘Jay’ C. Stewart, III is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Florida State University, specializing in Comparative Politics. His research investigates how centrist elites contribute to the normalization of extremist parties, with a particular focus on European radical right politics. His dissertation employs survey experiments in the German context to examine how elite behavior influences democratic norms and voter attitudes toward extremism. Jay’s broader research agenda includes projects on environmental justice, judicial independence, and gender quotas. His methodological expertise includes causal inference with observational data, survey design, GIS analysis in R, and latent variable modeling using time-series cross-sectional data. He has independently taught Introduction to Comparative Politics and Understanding Political Science Research, designed a course on the European Radical Right and led workshops on R for incoming graduate students. His teaching philosophy emphasizes empathy, accessibility, and active learning, incorporating simulations, games, and collaborative group work to foster student engagement and community.
Qing Wang
Qing Wang’s research centers on the politics of authoritarian regimes with a focus on Chinese politics. Her work addresses two core research questions: (1) how domestic citizens adapt to information control regulations in China and how foreign audiences respond to China’s state propaganda that targets the international audience, and (2) how public perceptions of social mobility shape political support for the regime. Her first dissertation chapter examines how citizens’ online communication is affected by a policy of compulsory IP address disclosure in China. The second chapter investigates how U.S. audiences respond to Chinese state propaganda narratives that intends to shape the perception of China’s state image. The third chapter analyzes how public perceptions of upward mobility in China influence political support for the regime. Methodologically, her research employs survey experiments and quasi-experimental causal inference designs. Her coauthored work has been published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science and PS: Political Science & Politics. She teaches courses on Introduction to Comparative Politics and Politics of China.