Dean Schafer completed his PhD at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on the values and incentives that shape coalition building in backsliding democracies. Broadly, his interests include political economy, comparative democracy and autocracy, and data science methods.  

He scrapes social media data to get leverage on the attitudes, networks, and behavior of political elites, which is especially useful in hard-to-observe settings such as authoritarian countries. His work has been published in Party Politics, South European Society and Politics, and Nationalities Papers, as well as public-facing outlets including The Democracy Paradox and Foreign Policy in Focus.