WELCOME!

I am a Lecturer in Quantitative Political and Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London. I am also the Director of Birkbeck’s interdisciplinary Postgraduate Social Research Programmes, a Research Associate of the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research and the Co-Director of the Centre for Political Economy and Institutional Studies.

My research interrogates the institutional and policy foundations of democratic and authoritarian governance in multi-ethnic societies, integrating qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods, including applications of generative AI in social sciences research. With China as my primary case anchor and a comparative reach extending to India and Southeast Asia, my work addresses a range of core questions in comparative politics and political economy, such as the conditions sustaining authoritarian resilience (or inducing democratic backsliding), the politics of race and ethnicity, and the interplay between state capacity and nation-state building.

Before coming to Birkbeck, I held fellowship positions at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Between 2026-2028, I will be a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Methodology at LSE.

Email: c.cheng[at]bbk.ac.uk.