Tianhui Wu

Greetings! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Iowa. I received my MA in Political Theory from Sun Yat-sen University and my BA in Political Science and Public Administration from Fudan University.

My research interests lie at the intersection of comparative public opinion, political behavior, and media politics. I employ both statistical and computational methods to study perceived corruption, mass media, and electoral politics.

My dissertation, Understanding the Role of Propaganda in Shaping Corruption Perceptions in Autocracies, investigates how authoritarian governments strategically deploy anti-corruption propaganda and how such messaging reshapes citizens’ perceptions of corruption. Leveraging a large-scale computational analysis of China’s state television transcripts and nationally representative survey data, the project further extends the inquiry cross-nationally to examine whether these dynamics generalize across diverse authoritarian regimes.

Beyond my dissertation, I am broadly interested in how information environments shape political attitudes and behaviors under both authoritarian and democratic settings.