Alexis Y. Jang

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

My research lies at the intersection of International Relations and Comparative Politics, with a focus on gender and politics, electoral preferences, and political representation. Specifically, I study public attitudes toward women leaders and gender equality policies through two lines of research. The first examines how domestic political crises shape electoral preferences for women’s political leadership, drawing on my regional expertise in South Korea. The second explores how international security environments—including war, terrorism, and geopolitical rivalry—shape public support for women leaders, combining cross-national analysis with an in-depth case study of South Korea.

To address these questions, I use a multi-method approach that combines computational tools (text-as-data and large language models) with surveys and field experiments. I place particular emphasis on causal inference, using original experiments and quasi-experimental designs based on observational data.

My work is published in the Journal of Peace Research, and I am involved in several solo and collaborative projects, including work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. I also teach data analysis and data visualization through short courses at the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences and undergraduate methods labs.

I am an affiliate at the Political Data Science Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. Before coming to WashU, I received my MA and BA in Political Science from Seoul National University.

You can reach me at alexis.jang@wustl.edu.