Susan D. Hyde

Bio 

Susan D. Hyde is the Robson Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley, where she was Chair of the Department of Political Science (AY 2021-2024) and is co-director of the Institute of International Studies (2021-   ).   She studies international influences on the domestic politics of sovereign states, teaches courses on international relations and comparative politics, and is active in promoting policy-relevant research. She is an expert on international election observation, election fraud, and democracy promotion. Her research on election observation included serving as an international election observer on delegations in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela with several organizations. She has worked with the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, Democracy International, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems on democracy promotion issues and researching how democracy promoting organizations can evaluate the effects of their work.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, was a professor at Yale University from 2006-2016, and held residential fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She was recognized with the Karl Deutch Award from the International Studies Association in 2018 awarded annually "to a scholar under 40 who is judged to have made (through a body of publications) the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research." She delivered the 2017 Linfield College commencement address, where she received her BA in 2000. From 2016-2018 she served a three year elected term as the Executive Director of the Evidence in Governance and Politics network. She has served or is serving on the editorial boards of International Organization, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Research & Politics.

Her first book, "The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm", was published by Cornell University Press in 2011. It won the International Studies Association's 2012 Chadwick Alger Prize for the best book on international organization and multilateralism, APSA's 2012 Comparative Democratization Section best book award, and the 2012 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for the best book on an international topic by a member of the Yale ladder faculty. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Political Analysis, the Review of International Organizations, Science Advances, Science, and World Politics. She has contributed to a several edited volumes and other publications.

As part of her work with EGAP, she served on the inaugural Metaketa committee, which developed a new research model that encourages independent research teams to engage in coordinated field experimental research, the results of which feed into a pre-registered meta-analysis.  While Executive Director of EGAP, she oversaw and served as the Principal Investigator for Metaketas II, III, and IV, and is current the co-chair, with Eddy Malesky, of the Metaketa V steering committee. 

With Nikolay Marinov and many students, she continues to compile the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset, which is freely available to other scholars and practitioners, and provides detailed data on all national elections throughout the world from 1945-present. 

She is a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Center for Effective Global Action, the Center on the Politics of Development, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society. She is a founding member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics research network, and a national member of the Council on Foreign Relations.