Political Science

Emily Sellars

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Emily Sellars is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. Sellars’ research interests are at the intersection of comparative political economy, development economics, and economic history. Her dissertation, “Essays on Emigration and Politics,” received the 2017 Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy defended in the previous two years. Currently, she is working on several papers to be published in The Journal of Politics and the Journal of Development Economics.

Dara Strolovitch

Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Professor of American Studies and Political Science

Dara Z. Strolovitch is a professor of women’s gender, and sexuality studies; American studies, and political science at Yale, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She received her B.A. in political Sscience from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in political Sscience from Yale. She taught previously at the University of Minnesota and at Princeton University.

Patrick Sullivan

Postdoctoral Associate

Patrick is a postdoctoral associate at ISPS’s American Political Economy eXchange (APEX), a PhD candidate at the University of Konstanz, and an associated researcher at “The Politics of Inequality” Research Cluster at the University of Konstanz. His research interests include tax policy, economic inequality, and redistributive preferences. Patrick holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary education social studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also majored in history, political science, and economics.

Milan Svolik

Elizabeth S. & A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science

Milan Svolik is Elizabeth S. & A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on comparative politics, political economy, and formal political theory.

He has authored and co-authored articles on the politics of authoritarian regimes and democratization in leading political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics.

Peter Swenson

C.M. Saden Professor of Political Science

Peter A. Swenson is Yale’s C.M. Saden Professor of Political Science. He specializes in the comparative political economy of labor markets and social welfare in Europe and the United States. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the economic, political and social foundations of social policy and market regulation in developed capitalist democracies.

Ian Turner

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Klaudia Wegschaider

External Postdoctoral Associate (University of Vienna)

Klaudia Wegschaider is an external fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University as well as 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.

Steven Wilkinson

Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Steven I. Wilkinson (Ph.D., MIT) is dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is the Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and professor of political science and international affairs at Yale University. Prior to taking up the FAS dean position in January 2025 he served as Henry R.

Itamar Yakir

Postdoctoral Associate

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.