The American Political Science Association is pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) Awardees for 2023. The APSA DDRIG program provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation research in political science. Awards support basic research which is theoretically derived and empirically oriented.
Ye Zhang is a PhD candidate in political science at MIT. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics, state-business relations, bureaucracy, and social welfare. Her dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how authoritarian states exert political control through private firms, aiming to address two questions: When do autocrats use private firms as instruments for political control? How do they implement this strategy? Empirically, she uses quantitative and qualitative data from China to examine state infiltration of private firms via party cells and state ownership shares and their potential pacifying effects. Ye also has a research agenda on inequality, bureaucracy, and the regulation of firms. Her coauthored research with Hao Zhang investigates how bureaucratic and business incentives have led to weak enforcement of China’s social insurance policies, with regressive consequences for workers. Previously, Ye was a ChinaFile Research Fellow at Asia Society, New York. She received an MA in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) from Columbia University, an MSc in Government and Politics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a BSc in Greater China Studies from The Education University of Hong Kong.