My name is Yang ZHANG. I completed an MA in Political Science at the University of Tartu after earning a BA in American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. I am currently pursuing an MPhil in Politics and Public Administration at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University and serve as a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I study authoritarian political economy through a Hayekian lens, focusing on knowledge constraints, market coordination, and the limits of discretionary power.

My research focuses on authoritarianism, democratization, quantitative methods, and the mechanisms that sustain authoritarian resilience, with China and Hong Kong serving as core cases and providing a comparative perspective on their global reverberations. Substantively, I focus on two linked themes: authoritarian diffusion and power transition. I test how China’s development finance, investment, aid, and technology transfer diffuse governance practices abroad, using outcomes such as UN General Assembly voting congruence, ideal-point shifts, policy convergence in human rights and cyber governance, and the adoption of surveillance and information-control tools; in parallel, I model elite turnover hazards and coalition durability under personalist centralization using event-history designs, text-as-data, and mixed methods.

I have worked in Dr. Jacob Reidhead’s lab for over a year, deepening my knowledge of Taiwan politics—especially local politics and legislatures. I encourage motivated students to join this lab to advance research on Taiwan and democratic resilience, particularly in the context of political capitalism. I plan to apply for PhD programs in Hong Kong and the United States, focusing on autocratization and the political economy of authoritarian regimes.

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