Hi, I’m Tyler! Welcome to my website.
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan, where I am also completing an M.A. in Statistics. What lies behind the change of political parties and party systems? Are party elites’ internal fights and campaign strategies reshaping the political landscape, or do changing population structures produce social forces strong enough to push the change through on their own? I study both: the elite origins and the societal foundations of parties and party systems. On the elite side, I ask how much power party elites wield when they build campaign platforms united, and how much damage they inflict on the vehicles they built when factional interests pull them apart. On the societal side, I treat voter groups as the other set of players in this game: does the geographical distribution of racial and ethnic groups drive regional party fragmentation? Does the rise and fall of age cohorts contribute to the birth and death of parties?
I also treat my substantive interest as a methodological question: answering either side requires recovering how groups actually vote from aggregate election results and censuses, and I build the ecological-inference tools that do so. My approach is multi-method by necessity rather than taste. I join formal models to archives, candidate-level career panels to multi-sited fieldwork, and geocoded election and census panels to hierarchical Bayesian estimation, reading my cases in their own languages: Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian.
My dissertation and book project, “The Tower of Babel We Bury: Geography, Group-Making, and the Communal Foundations of Party Systems,” asks when the mismatch between a party’s demographic umbrella and the group’s internal heterogeneity grows too large for the platform to hold, and what happens to the party system when the buried difference reasserts itself. I develop the argument across the United States, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan. In Malaysia, I trace how the settlement geography of Malay and Chinese communities helped build, and later helped unsettle, the coalition behind Barisan Nasional (the National Front, BN). In Florida, I follow two decades of registered voters to watch Hispanic communities move and re-sort across the state, using geocoded churches and music-radio listening as signals of communal change. My fieldwork runs from the Malay neighborhoods of Kuala Lumpur and the coastal villages of Terengganu to the Detroit suburbs and New York City’s three Chinatowns.
My research appears in the Journal of East Asian Studies and, with Congcong Fu, in the two leading Chinese-language journals of Southeast Asian studies; three further papers are under review. Party systems stand on moving ground: I study what happens when the ground shifts, and I build the instruments to see it.
My papers, datasets, and CV are linked above.
I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.
Outside the academy, I am dad of two black cats, Erik and Theda, and a volunteer foster with the Humane Society of Huron Valley.
