Yasin Shafi

I am a PhD student in Political Science (Comparative Politics) at Pennsylvania State University. My research sits at the intersection of authoritarian politics, opposition parties, resistance to autocratization, and public policy in weak democracies, with a regional focus on South Asia.

My current work examines why some opposition party members engage in riskier activism under autocratization. To study this, I designed and fielded an original survey of opposition party members in Bangladesh during the post-2024 political transition.

I am also investigating why some protest movements sustain momentum under repression while others collapse. I use machine learning to classify protest events in autocracies and network analysis to trace how organizational structure shapes a movement’s capacity to diffuse and endure under state repression.

At Penn State, I work as a Research Assistant with Joe Wright on constructing a latent index of ruling party personalism. I hold an MPP in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Michigan, where I studied with a Fulbright award, and BSS and MSS degrees in Development Studies from the University of Dhaka. My co-authored article with Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and Joe Wright — “Ruling Party Personalism and Central Bank Independence” — is accepted at The Journal of Politics (2025).