Congratulations to Dr. Eddie Yang on being awarded the 2025 Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association’s Information Technology and Society 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 cautions against the assumption that technological advances automatically strengthen repressive governments. A related paper, “The Limits of AI for Authoritarian Control,” is forthcoming at the American Journal of Political Science.

At Purdue, Yang brings together computational tools and political science to tackle some of the most 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 work with graduate and undergraduate students, he describes the project that uses large language models for data annotation as a “fun experience” and a advises students to “be passionate about the things you want to work on and enjoy the experience.” He notes “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 implementing an advanced covariate balancing method that makes rigorous causal inference more accessible to applied researchers.

He has recently returned from a fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Center for Science of Innovation where he worked on projects that explore how policies and political institutions shape technological innovation. He is happy to be back on campus: “I really like that Purdue has hired many new faculty in the past few years. It’s great - every day I get to hear new research ideas from people who are just as new to Indiana as I am. It really makes West Lafayette feel like the Los Angeles of Indiana.” Dr. Yang is part of a growing faculty hired across the College of Liberal Arts and in the department with exciting research agendas studying the implications of technological changes in society.