Overview
Bryn Rosenfeld is an Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology.
Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of a Frances Rosenbluth best paper prize, as well as a Best Article Award honorable mention and Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section.
Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets.
Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Research Focus
Comparative Politics, Political Behavior, Development and Democratization, Authoritarian Regimes, Protest, Post-communism, Survey Methods