👋 Hi there! Welcome!

I am a PhD candidate (near completion and on the job market) in Political Science at Freie Universisät Berlin. I also work as a Predoctoral researcher at a research project on Digital governance in China funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Trained as a political scientist, I have a deep passion for interdisciplinary approaches to studying complex questions with profound societal and political implications in the digital era across multiple levels. My research interests lie in the intersection among politics, psychology, and technology, including the macro-level transformation of political structure and institution in modern autocracies and democracies, and the micro-level interaction between the psychological dimension (esp. affect and emotion) and digital-enabled political control (aka. digital control).

My dissertation project investigates the dynamics and consequences of the emerging digital authoritarianism focusing on the state-society relationship from an understudied perspective of emotion. Theoretically, it bridges conventional authoritarian politics with the political psychology of emotion, and proposes an emotion-based approach to studying the interplays of state and society characterized by digital control. Using China as the key empirical case and through a mixed-methods research design, it explores the multifaceted role of emotion in the daily operation of digital authoritarianism. The thesis aims to highlight and enrich the current understanding of the noninstitutional, nonmaterial aspect of modern authoritarian rule.

My work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Regulation & Governance, among others.

If you are interested in my research, collaboration, or have any question, don’t hesitate to write me via d.guo@fu-berlin.de.