Sun Young Park

Hello, I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

I study political behavior and electoral politics in developed democracies. My research addresses how political divisions and animosities between social groups are shaped by the interplay of economic structure, social environments, and psychological mechanisms. To theorize the interactions of these macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors, I combine perspectives of political economy, political sociology, and political psychology. Among contentious social divisions, I have focused on studying why gender and geographic divides in political attitudes arise in contemporary democracies. I use big data analysis, deep learning, spatial analysis, statistical causal inference, and survey methodology to answer these questions.

I am an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Center for European Studies and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard. I was a visiting fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the Fall of 2022 and at the SciencesPo Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics in the Spring of 2023. Before coming to Harvard, I hold a B.A. in economics and political science and an M.A. in political science from Seoul National University.