People call me "Bo" or “Ka Ming” (my given name, which means inscription of Eudaimonia).
Email: Ka-Ming.Chan@newcastle.ac.uk
Welcome! I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Comparative Politics at the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology, Newcastle University. I am one of the convenors of the Governance and Political Organisations (GPO) Cluster at Newcastle University. Since 2023, I have been serving on the Early Career Researcher Board of Political Psychology.
Broadly speaking, I study public opinion and political behaviour. My substantive research interest lies in the intersection of autocratization, radical politics, and information updating during elections. In terms of methodology, I often use surveys and causal inference.
I am currently working on a project called “Spillover in an Autocratization Age (SpAA)”. It studies how citizens in multi-level systems update various events (e.g. US Capitol insurrection; military coups; authoritarians/oppositions' electoral victories). As these events took place in an international system, I analyze whether and how these events change citizens’ political attitudes and behaviour across borders. Overall, this project aims to challenge the state-centred assumption that underlies the autocratization literature.
My works have received awards from the PSA Specialist Group on Autocracy and Regime Change and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). My research has been funded by various institutions, including DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), European Survey Research Association, the German Federal Foreign Office, and Heinz und Sybille Laufer Foundation.
Before joining Newcastle, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) in Canada. I obtained my PhD in Political Science at LMU Munich in June 2022. During my graduate study, I was a visiting researcher at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).