Our growing Democratic Innovations community includes visiting faculty fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and research associates who remain involved with the program even after their fellowship ends. Meet our former and current fellows.
2023-24 Visiting Faculty Fellow
Alexandra Cirone
Alexandra “Ali” Cirone is an assistant professor in the London School of Economics’ School of Public Policy (SPP) and has a joint appointment in the Government Department. She also holds a research appointment at the BI Norwegian Business School, and she is a non-resident fellow in the Democratic Innovations Program at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. She is one of the editors and co-founders of Broadstreet.blog, a blog on historical political economy.
Her research interests center on political selection and institutional design in democracies, lottocratic governance and policy, historical political economy. She combines quantitative and computational methods, historical data, and natural and/or quasi-experimental research designs with extensive archival research. Her recent work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Historical Political Economy, and the Annual Review of Political Science. Her personal website can be found at acirone.com.
Spring 2024 Visiting Faculty Fellow
Samuel Bagg
Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before coming to USC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.
His research aims to ground democratic theorizing in a realistic picture of the dynamics of social inequality and political power. Among other venues, it has appeared in the American Political Science Review; the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Politics; Perspectives on Politics; the Journal of Political Philosophy; the European Journal of Political Theory; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; Social Philosophy and Policy; Social Theory and Practice; and Political Research Quarterly. His first book (The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy) synthesizes much of this work, offering a distinctive and comprehensive account of why democracy matters and how to make it better. It was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.
2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellows
Kaylyn Jackson Schiff
Kaylyn Jackson Schiff is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and co-director of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL).
Dr. Schiff studies American politics and policy, with a focus on quantitative and experimental methods. Her research addresses how citizens share information with government and examines the drivers of policymaker and bureaucrat responsiveness to citizen input. Additionally, she devotes particular attention to the impacts of emerging technologies on government and society. For example, she considers how technological developments are changing citizen-government contact and explores implications for service provision, misinformation, policing, education, and government use of artificial intelligence.
Professor Schiff’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Policy Studies Journal, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Public Administration, the American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. In addition, her dissertation — “The Digital Citizen: The Impact of Technology on Public Participation and Government Responsiveness” — won the 2023 Leonard D. White Award for Best Dissertation in the Field of Public Administration by the American Political Science Association.
Kaylyn received her Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Emory University and completed a B.A. in public policy from Princeton University and an M.Ed. from Fordham University. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she was a postdoctoral associate with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Previously, Kaylyn worked in K-12 education as a teacher and as a school administrator focused on curriculum design, assessment, and educational data use.
Michael Pomirchy
Michael Pomirchy is a researcher at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D in politics from Princeton University in 2022, with concentrations in American politics and political economy. During the 2022-2023 academic year, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is working remotely in the New York area.
At Princeton, Pomirchy was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and was a fellow for the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science (Q-APS) from 2020 to 2022. Before coming to Princeton, he received a MSc in political science and political economy from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in political science and economics from California State University, Los Angeles.
2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellows
Danil Dmitriev
Currently a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of George, Dmitriev is a microeconomic theorist with a focus on learning, organizational economics, and political economy. His current research agenda includes design of incentives for motivating creative experimentation, study of misperceptions in the contexts of polarization in social learning and present bias in intertemporal choices, and influence of “money in politics” and outside groups on political outcomes.
For Democratic Innovations, Dmitriev l built upon ongoing work exploring the design of voting mechanisms in the presence of outside saboteurs who submit fraudulent votes, showing that to neutralize the interference, the voting mechansim must be augmented with a version of status-quo bias. Other projects included explorations of how should one incentivize creativity when being creative is costly and learning via shared news.
Dmitriev earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego and his BSc in mathematics and economics from NRU Higher School of Economics & University of London International Programmes in Moscow, Russia.
Antonin Lacelle-Webster
Antonin Lacelle-Webster received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of British Columbia in 2023. His research focuses primarily on democratic theory, with a particular interest in democratic innovation, political agency, and the politics of hope and disappointment. He is also involved with Participedia as a member of the Democratic Representation research cluster and the Editorial Board.
His current book project focuses on uncertainty, temporality, and collective action in democratic politics and their interactions with hope. This project aims to distinguish a politics of hope embedded in open-ended, discursive, and collective political practices and spaces and attend to its implications for the structure and orientation of democratic systems. His research has been published in various books and journals, including the European Journal of Political Theory.
Mackenzie Lockhart
Mackenzie Lockhart received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego in 2023. His research focuses on elections, representation, and public opinion with particular focus on how voters behave in American elections and consequences for representation.
In the past, he has studied how voters rely on heuristics in primary elections, the impact of the death of local newspapers on polarization and accountability, and how public opinion incentives constrain elected officials. He has also worked on policy questions focused on how election administrators can best serve voters and build trust in a rapidly changing public opinion environment.
Théophile Péniguad
Théophile Pénigaud specializes in political theory and his research interests include the history of political thought, democratic theory, and political epistemology. His book The People’s Deliberations: Context and Concepts of Rousseau’s Political Philosophy was published in French by Classiques Garnier in 2024. He holds a Ph.D. from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Just before coming to Yale, he directed a Junior Laboratory on “Changes and Current Trends in Democracies” at the École Normale Supérieure and was a lecturer at Lyon 3 University.
Shir Raviv
2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellows
Klaudia Wegschaider
Klaudia Wegschaider is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on the causes and consequences of electoral reforms, especially enfranchisement. Methodologically, she is primarily a qualitative researcher, combining case studies with quantitative and experimental methods. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and other outlets.
In the 2024-25 academic year, Wegschaider was onsite as a Democratic Innovations postdoctoral associate. During her time at Yale, she completed her first book manuscript on contemporary enfranchisement. The manuscript builds on her doctoral dissertation, which Wegschaider defended with no corrections at the University of Oxford. She was awarded Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award from the APSA European Politics and Society section as well as an Honourable Mention for the Dissertation Award by the APSA Migration and Citizenship section.
Itamar Yakir
Itamar Yakir is a postdoctoral sssociate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies and with Yale’s Identity and Conflict Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2023.
Yakir studies political economy, political behavior, and public policy and has a special interest in social identity and the situation of migrants and minorities in the labor markets. His current projects focus on the divergence in the perception of reality and how it affects the relations between groups and the emergence of political positions.
He has been a researcher at the center for governance and the economy at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he wrote about the integration of minorities in the labor market, Israeli politics, and local elections. His work has been published in Public Choice and is forthcoming in American Journal of Policial Science.
2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellows
Alexander Love
Alexander Love earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he earned his M.A. in political Sscience from UNC and his B.A. in public policy and data analytics from William & Mary. His research investigates how administrative procedures and legal structures shape policy outcomes and contribute to inequality in the United States, with a focus on the federal bureaucracy and the criminal justice system. His work has appeared in Policy Studies Journal, Perspectives on Politics, and American Criminal Law Review.
Eli Rau
Eli Rau is a postdoctoral associate with the Democratic Innovations program at ISPS and the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. His primary areas of research include comparative electoral institutions, voter turnout, and democratic erosion. In current research projects, he examines the link between economic inequality and democratic erosion; whether compulsory voting is good for democracy; and how norms of reciprocity can enable democratic erosion even in the absence of strong partisanship.
Prior to joining ISPS, he earned his PhD in Political Science at Yale and held postdoctoral positions at Princeton and Vanderbilt. He is also an assistant professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico.