Georgy Tarasenko

Ph.D. student in Government

Cornell University

I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in Government at Cornell University with a major in Comparative Politics and minors in Political Thought and Methods.

At Cornell I am a graduate fellow at the Institute for European Studies and the Center on Global Democracy. I am an affiliate of Cornell Center for the Social Sciences and a research assistant for the Russian Election Study

In 2024/25 academic year I was a graduate fellow at the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, and a 2024 Kohut Fellow at the Roper Center For Public Opinion Research. Before this, I worked as a research assistant at the Center of Institutional Studies (now, the Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms) at HSE University and was a resident at the Digital Humanities Center at ITMO University. I have also contributed to various academic programs as a lecturer and teaching fellow.

I hold a Master's degree in Comparative Social Research (HSE University).(with mandatory elective in neuroeconomics) and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science (HSE University) with a minor in Data Science and research specialization in formal and quantitative methods (both degrees with honors). I was in a visiting student at the Department of  Social and Behavioral Sciences in Leiden University (The Netherlands) in Fall, 2019.

My work been supported by the Cornell Einaudi Center for International Studies, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, and Institute for Humane Studies.

You can access my CV here.

research

My research brings together comparative politics, political economy, and behavioral sciences, while being deeply informed by political theory and intellectual history. In my dissertation book project, I plan to examine the comparative behavioral political economy of dissent. More specifically, I am intended to investigate the psychological mechanisms that drive individuals to resist autocrats, illiberal leaders, and democratic backsliding—and how these mechanisms interact with institutions, culture, and historical legacies. Beyond this core agenda, I maintain broader interests in questions in political psychology, behavior, and the political economy of development. I am also engaged with metascientific questions related to research replicability and knowledge cumulation in social sciences.

Methodologically, I primarily employ quantitative and computational approaches, while integrating qualitative insights when appropriate. My work is driven by substantive questions rather than methodological allegiance, but I have particular interests in survey methodology (e.g., preference elicitation on sensitive topics, multimodal data analysis including text, audio, and behavioral traces), and in the sensitivity of small-area estimation techniques to site selection. I also think on broader problems in causal inference and experimental design, including issues related to site selection, factorial and adaptive experiments and other general questions in econometrics, psychometrics, GIS, and machine learning.

bio