Yuequan Guo

Yuequan Guo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institutions and Political Inequality unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He studies collective action and state repression in autocracies. His research investigates two topics: 1) how ordinary people overcome barriers to collective action and mobilize in autocracies, and 2) what reduces repressive activities by authoritarian states. Specifically, he examines how workers initiate strikes in industrial hubs of China, how strikes spread in relation to government crackdowns across China, and how workers in the hinterland of China resist pressure from employers. Addressing the two theoretical questions in the context of China also leads him to study the domestic migration of workers, which disseminates the knowledge and experience of collective action and affects the cost and benefit of repressive activities for government officials. He approaches these questions using formal theory, network analysis, causal inference, statistical models, and ethnography.

Guo completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan in August 2023. He was a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Southern California from 2014 to 2015. Previously, he worked as a project coordinator for the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Liberia for two years. He also received an M.S. in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. in Public Administration from Xi’an Jiaotong University.

For more information about his work, please visit https://yuequanguo.com.