Bryn Rosenfeld

Assistant Professor

Overview

Bryn Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, a former editor at the Washington Post Monkey Cage, and a Principal Investigator of the 2021 Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, post-communism, and survey methodology.

Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the American Political Science Association's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of the Frances Rosenbluth prize for best paper published in CPS in 2021, as well as the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation and a Best Article Award honorable mention, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section.

Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Sociological Methods & Research, and Post-Soviet Affairs among other outlets.

Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She has also worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.