Duong Thi Thuy Pham

Duong Pham is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. They study propaganda and information control in authoritarian regimes, with a special focus on how these governments redefine democracy and related norms such as human rights to reinforce their legitimacy. In their dissertation, Pham combines quantitative text-as-data methods, field research, and original survey experiments to trace the origins of democratic rhetoric in authoritarian systems, analyze its manifestation in domestic and international discourse, and evaluate its impact on the capacity for social control and on public perceptions of regime legitimacy.

Pham’s regional expertise spans Southeast and Northeast Asia, with a substantive focus on Vietnam and China. They are also pursuing research on the international relations of the Asia-Pacific, ASEAN, LGBT politics in Vietnam, and applications of AI to qualitative research methods.

Pham holds a bachelor of social science from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (Japan), a master of law from Peking University (China)—where they were a Yenching scholar at the Yenching Academy and a Baixian scholar with the Baixian Asia Institute—and a master of arts from the University of California, San Diego.