We are delighted to announce that Ph.D. Candidate Ae sil Woo will join Gettysburg College in August 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. This continues our department's strong run of Ph.D. placements, and she becomes the first UC Merced Political Science Ph.D. to join a Liberal Arts College. Ae sil studies how dictators manage the trade-off between reducing opposition threat and minimizing policy loss. Specifically, she explores leaders' strategic rule manipulations to decouple the opposition's electoral success from policy influence while increasing the inclusiveness of a legislative process. Her work, which has been published in the Journal of Politics and the Annals of Comparative Democratization, contributes to our understanding of why dictators create heterogeneous legislative institutions and how those institutions affect a variety of political outcomes including opposition dissent and executive term limits.
You can learn more about Ae sil at her website, www.aesilwoo.com.
