Georgiy Syunyaev

I’m an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. I hold a Ph.D. Degree in Political Science from Columbia University.

In my research, I rely on survey and field experimental methods, formal theory, and qualitative work to study how citizens in autocratic regimes react to media exposure and how autocrats make policy decisions with a particular focus on decentralization. While my work is relevant for many authoritarian and weak democratic contexts, it is motivated by my interest in understanding the role of propaganda in regime survival in Russia and other Post-Soviet countries.

Beyond my substantive interests, I work on knowledge accumulation methods in social sciences. In my work, I pay special attention to research transparency and, over the years, contributed to several R packages: CausalQueries, DeclareDesign, and hiddenmeta.

Previously I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institutions and Political Inequality Unit at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB Berlin), and a research fellow at the J-PAL Global and the International Center for Studies for the Study of Institutions and Development at HSE University, as well as visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and the World Bank’s Development Group.

You can download my CV here.