I study threats to democracy, the role of regime type in international affairs, and international influences on the domestic politics of sovereign states. My research spans election observation, election fraud, democracy promotion, and international norms. I mostly teach International Relations but I have published research in International Relations, Comparative Politics, American Politics, and Methods.

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Bio

Susan D. Hyde is the Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-directs the Institute of International Studies and was Chair of the Department of Political Science (AY 2021–2024). She studies international influences on the domestic politics of sovereign states, with a focus on elections, election fraud, democratic backsliding, and democracy promotion.

With Nikolay Marinov and many students, she compiles the NELDA (National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy) dataset, which is freely available to other scholars and practitioners and provides detailed data on all national elections in the world from 1945 to the present. With Eddy Malesky, she co-chairs the steering committee for Metaketa V, part of a coordinated field-experiment model she helped develop through EGAP, in which independent research teams run parallel studies whose results feed into a pre-registered meta-analysis. With Elizabeth Saunders, she has written on how regime type and democratic constraints shape international relations and U.S. foreign policy, and with Jennie Barker and Oren Samet she studies nonpartisan election observation in the United States.

Hyde is the author of The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm (Cornell University Press, 2011), which won the International Studies Association’s Chadwick Alger Prize and APSA’s Comparative Democratization Section best book award. Her earlier research on election observation included serving as an international election observer on delegations in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Venezuela, with organizations including the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Science, and Science Advances, among other journals.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006 and was a member of the faculty at Yale University from 2006 to 2016. In 2018 she received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association.

Affiliations