Benjamin Yoel
About Me
Hello! I'm Benjamin Yoel, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. I received my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University in May 2026, and was previously a Predoctoral Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago's Center on Democracy, a data consultant at the Democratic Erosion Consortium, and the Editorial Assistant at The Journal of Politics. I study democratic backsliding, with a focus on the nexus of domestic and international factors in shaping domestic opposition to democratic backsliding. My other research interests include understanding the broader causes and consequences of democratic backsliding as well as making different types of data more accessible to researchers and practitioners.
My main research project is a book, based on my dissertation, on the international dimensions of opposition to democratic backsliding, where I highlight the supply- and demand-side of foreign pressure on democratic developments. To this end, I use an original dataset of remarks by US Secretaries of State from 1997 to 2025 (n=17,600 remarks), data from Google Trends, and survey experiments from Hungary (n=4,000 respondents).
Beyond my book, I have published five articles: one in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research on the international consequences of democratic backsliding for public attitudes toward democracy, two in Nature that introduce novel datasets, and two in American Politics Research. I have several projects in the pipeline, including a book project under advanced contracts at Cambridge Elements on the implications of ascriptive identities in shaping public tolerance of democratic transgressions, a new dataset on the US Senate (R&R), and several projects on the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding and opposition to it.
In addition to my research, I am passionate about teaching and mentoring students from a range of backgrounds. I have taught courses on War and Security and Pandemics and Social Science as well as mentored over a dozen undergraduate and master's students, including in my role as a data consultant at the Democratic Erosion Consortium and as a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research Institute. I have also led seminars introducing students to quantitative methods and given guest lectures at different universities on my substantive areas of focus.
Before my Postdoc at Stanford and my PhD at MSU, I lived in both Thailand and Israel.
Research and Teaching Interests
Democratic Backsliding, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Public Opinion, Contentious Politics, International Security.
Website benjaminyoel.com
