Alexander ZHANG

Welcome to a World of Disinformation, Correction, Propaganda, and Polarization!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where I specialize in Comparative Politics and Political Behavior. My main research interests lie at the intersection of comparative political economy and political behavior, with a regional focus on East Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America.

My dissertation generates novel insights into the political economy of autocratic and democratic regimes by delving into the effects of government data falsification and its correction from different sources on political trust (presented at 2023 APSA and accepted by the Government Information Quarterly, 2024 Impact Factor: 10.0) and the influences of political polarization on the effectiveness of propaganda from different entities (presented at 2024 and 2025 PolMeth, APSA, and many other conferences). A mixed-methods approach combining quantitative analysis, text as data, and survey experiments helps me reveal the causal mechanisms during the above processes, where economic, political, and cultural factors interact with each other. In the near future, I will extend my research on the political consequences of polarization and propaganda investigated by my dissertation project, which involves large-scale data, causal research designs, and coding.

Besides my dissertation papers, I have also engaged in additional projects relevant to my research interests.

My published paper in Social Indicators Research (available here) investigates the interaction between people’s e-government usage frequencies and satisfaction with the government during the COVID-19 outbreak control in China. The article forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary China (available here) examines the role of China’s authoritarian nature in shaping foreigners’ perceptions of its growing multilateral engagement. My paper, accepted by the Journal of Comparative Economics, reveals the impact of schooling under Communism on political attitudes during the years of the former East Germany’s transition to democracy.

Some other studies explore the decisions regarding government data falsification, its correction, and relevant propaganda by developing a game-theoretic model, the political consequences of different narratives of economic data falsification in the Chinese government’s two large-scale self-confessions, tug of war between different elements of personality shaped by schooling under Communism over vote choice, the relationship between the consumption of foreign cultural products and the recent surge in populist authoritarianism in the US, country image during crisis management by applying aspect-based sentiment measurement, and the multi-level international negotiations like the Russia-Ukraine peace talks based on AI agents.

Prior to attending the University of Pittsburgh, I worked as a research assistant at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, as an international education consultant in Shanghai, and with project management for an international education company in Zhengzhou, Henan, China.

I earned my BSc in Applied Chemistry from Chengdu University of Technology, BA in Economics from Durham University, MSc in Economics from University College London and MA in Political Science from Columbia University in the City of New York.