Postdoctoral Fellows

Antonin Lacelle-Webster

External Postdoctoral Associate

Antonin Lacelle-Webster is an external fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. He 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.

Mackenzie Lockhart

External Postdoctoral Associate

Mackenzie Lockhart is an external Postdoctoral Associate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He 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.

Alexander Love

Postdoctoral Associate

Alexander Love is a Democratic Innovations postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). He 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.

Itay Machtei

Postdoctoral Associate

Itay Machtei is a postdoctoral associate with the Consortium on the American Political Economy (CAPE) based at the ISPS’s American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) program. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025. His research agenda broadly focuses on the social and distributive outcomes of state and market institutions and is organized around two complementary strands.

Philip Moniz

Postdoctoral Associate

Philip Moniz is a postdoctoral associate in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale. He received a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. His research ranges across political behavior and political psychology, with a keen interest in the causes and consequences of voters’ policy attitudes.

Theophile Penigaud

External Postdoctoral Associate (Sciences Po, Paris)

Théophile Pénigaud is an external postdoctoral fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. Before joining Yale University in July 2023, Dr. Pénigaud earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France). His research focuses on democratic theory, with a particular interest in deliberative democracy, democratic innovations, political epistemology, and the political philosophy of AI.

Area of study: governance and democratic process

Eli Rau

Postdoctoral Associate

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.

Shir Raviv

External Postdoctoral Associate (Columbia University)

Shir Raviv is a political scientist who studies the politics of using AI in public policy implementation. She employs experimental methods to investigate how citizens perceive and react to the use of data-driven algorithms in high-stakes domains such as criminal justice, policing, welfare, and education. She also examines how their views change after receiving information or having personal experience with the technology. Before joining Columbia University in September 2023, Dr. Raviv earned her Ph.D. and M.A.

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.

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.