About

 

I teach in the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and my research examines how international factors influence autocratic rule and democratization. My first book, with Abel Escriba-Folch, is Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival, which examines how foreign policy tools destabilize dictatorships. This book won the 2017 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.  A second book, with Barbara Geddes and Erica Frantz, is How Dictatorships Work. A third book, Migration and Democracy: How Remittances Undermine Dictatorships (with Abel Escriba-Folch and Covadonga Meseguer) won the 2023 APSA Migration & Citizenship Section Best Book Prize. I am also co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Coups d’etat.

My current research includes the The Origins of Elected Strongmen (with Erica Frantz and Andrea Kendall-Taylor), which examines how personalist political parties pave the path for democratic backsliding and collapse in the 21st century. I am also working on a project with Sophia McClennen and Srđa Popović that studies how creative, non-violent tactics shape the success of mass mobilization campaigns. Recent research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Foreign Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Politics.

I previously served as the co-Director of the Global and International Studies (GLIS) program and held the Jeffrey L. and Sharon D. Hyde Early Career Professorship at Penn State. I completed my PhD. at UCLA; and prior to arriving at Penn State, I was a post-doctoral research associate at Princeton University and a visiting faculty fellow at the University of Notre Dame.  In 2016 I was on leave in Cape Town as a visiting scholar at Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA). My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Minerva Research Initiative, and private foundations.

I can be contacted at joseph.g.wright (at) gmail (dot) com

A copy of my CV can be found here.

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