Congratulations to Dr. Eddie Yang on receiving the 2025 Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association's Information Technology and Politics section for his dissertation, "Automating Autocracy: Authoritarian Institutions and the Politics of Artificial Intelligence."

Yang's research highlights how authoritarian regimes, by silencing citizens and suppressing information, inadvertently weaken the very datasets their AI systems rely on. This paradox makes AI less reliable during political crises, when dissent is most visible, and suggests that autocracies may not benefit from AI as seamlessly as often assumed. His work challenges the assumption that technological advances automatically strengthen repressive governments.

A related paper, "The Limits of AI for Authoritarian Control," is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science.

At Purdue, Yang brings together computational tools and political science to tackle pressing questions about democracy, technology, and authoritarian resilience. His work underscores both the promise and the pitfalls of applying artificial intelligence to political life.

In new research with graduate and undergraduate students, Yang is exploring the use of large language models for data annotation. Describing the project as a "fun experience," he encourages students to "be passionate about the things you want to work on and enjoy the experience." He adds that "there are many exciting things happening at the intersection of AI and Political Science."

Dr. Yang also contributes to the research community through open-source software. His R packages, localLLM and powerLATE, provide tools for running large language models and conducting power analysis in R. In his 2023 Political Analysis article, "Hierarchically Regularized Entropy Balancing," co-authored with Yiqing Xu, they introduce hbal, an R package that implements an advanced covariate-balancing method to make rigorous causal inference more accessible to applied researchers.

Recently returning from a fellowship at Northwestern University's Kellogg Center for Science of Innovation, where he worked on projects exploring how policies and political institutions shape technological innovation, Yang is happy to be back on campus:

Dr. Yang is part of a growing group of faculty hired across the Department of Political Science and the College of Liberal Arts whose research examines the implications of technological change for society.