Stephen Schick

Stephen Schick is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations researching Chinese politics through the lenses of comparative and international political economy. His dissertation investigates how the expansion of privately held wealth poses political risks for authoritarian regimes, and how elites shape institutions to manage the tradeoffs between economic growth and domestic stability. Focusing on strategic interactions between political and economic elites using a novel dataset of intra-elite ties, he illustrates how these tensions affect industrial and fiscal policies, social welfare, and state responsiveness.

His other research areas include: assessing how economic interdependence and foreign investment affect conflict between states, the role of localized propaganda as a signaling mechanism to respond to adverse economic conditions, self-censorship’s impact on political attitudes and expression, and the effects of authoritarian institutions on international investment and global wealth chains.

He holds extensive experience in quantitative and mixed-methods research using R and Python, particularly in conducting large-n panel studies of states and firms, network analyses, and text analyses using LLMs, topic modeling, and word embeddings, as well as in conducting interviews and archival research in both English and Chinese. Having studied the Chinese language for over twelve years, he has spent considerable time in China for fieldwork, language study, and travel.

• BA Reed College, 1/2020
• School of Oriental & African Studies