About

Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His academic interests include comparative politics and political methodology, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia. Pepinsky studies the interaction of political and economic systems globally, with recent research exploring how social categories interact with these systems and how explanations are constructed in the social sciences. His current research involves the politics and political economy of democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia and Europe, as well as the evolution of ethnicity and social categories in the Malay world.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Security
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Economic growth
• Economics
• Economic geography
• Law

Selected publications

• Indonesia’s New Capital City: Public Funding and Public Support

  Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies · 2026-04-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Jokowi Presidency: Indonesia's Decade of Authoritarian RevivalBy SanaJaffrey and EveWarburton (eds.), Singapore: <scp>ISEAS</scp> Publishing, 2025. 311 pp. <scp>ISBN:</scp> 978‐9‐81‐530679‐8

  Asian-Pacific Economic Literature · 2026-04-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comparative Politics and the New Area Studies

  2025-10-15

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We revisit the divide that emerged in the 1990s between area studies advocates and methodologically oriented political scientists. We argue that tensions between political science and area studies are neither intrinsic nor static, but instead evolve in tandem with theoretical and methodological trends, as well as with political and technological developments. Drawing on a survey of American Political Science Association members and analysis of roughly 4,500 articles in leading journals, we identify four shifts in the discipline: from a theoretical to an empirical orientation; from cross-national datasets to country- and region- specific studies; from macro- to micro-level analyses; and from descriptive to causal inference. We also document patterns in language training, fieldwork, methods use, and data collection. Our findings suggest political science and area studies are increasingly compatible and well-positioned for reconciliation, but that the state of area studies is fragile and the subfield of comparative politics must support it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global Challenges to Democracy: Backsliding, Resiliency, and Democratic Theory

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-05-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Biased Learning from Elections

  2025-04-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  A foundational premise in democratic theory is that political competition encourages parties to be responsive to voters. Parties have incentives to respond to the median voter's preferences in order to win elections, and should learn from the results of elections where their platforms diverge from what the electorate wants. However, parties may be subject to motivated reasoning, wanting to believe that the electorate favors their own policy preferences. We develop a repeated model of elections with motivated beliefs to explore how this bias affects how parties compete with one another for popular support. Motivated beliefs lead to excessive platform divergence, and allow parties to infer from poor electoral outcomes that elections are unfair rather than that their platforms are unpopular. Disagreement about the fairness of the electoral system increases over time, even if platform divergence decreases. Our analysis reveals how motivated beliefs inhibit parties' ability to learn what voters want while encouraging partisans to distrust the electoral process itself.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Economy of Shitcoins

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• State, Society, and the Politics of Democratic Backsliding

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Voting in Authoritarian Elections

  American Political Science Review · 2025-03-14 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Democratic theorists hold that voting contributes to some political good: individual and collective autonomy, equality, justice, pluralism, stability, better policies, and many others. But elections are common under authoritarianism, and empirical research finds that holding elections can stabilize authoritarian regimes. This creates what we term the democrat’s dilemma, where citizens who vote in authoritarian elections may bolster the regimes they wish to unseat, even when they cast a vote for the opposition. We identify three major ways of thinking about the democratic value of electoral participation—justice-based, epistemic, and proceduralist approaches—and use them to examine the complex moral considerations that confront voters in authoritarian regimes. We contend that authoritarian elections’ residual democratic value can justify voting, even when doing so could further entrench the autocrat. Our argument also implies that the democratic principles that justify voting in authoritarian elections oblige citizens to choose the most democratic alternative.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Asia-Pacific Small States: Political Economies of Resilience

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2025-01-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comparative Area Studies

  2025-06-19

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter studies the organizational and institutional foundations of contemporary area studies in the United States and around the world. Focusing on European studies and Southeast Asian studies, we identify the contestedness of world regions as analytical constructs as a core issue facing area studies and argue that the institutional structures that encourage deep area knowledge (a prerequisite for comparative area studies) are different from the institutional structures that encourage cross-regional comparative work that is the essence of comparative area studies. We conclude that to foster comparative area studies, scholars should embrace the internal critiques of traditional area studies while seeking new institutional models that encourage cross-regional work that remains true to the deep substantive engagement of traditional area studies.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hayeon Lee

  New York University Press

  58 shared

• Dimitar D. Gueorguiev

  Syracuse University

  57 shared

• Stephan Haggard

  University of California, San Diego

  27 shared

• Saiful Mujani

  Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta

  24 shared

• Sara Wallace Goodman

  University of California, Irvine

  23 shared

• Krisztina Szabó

  Centre for Ecological Research

  18 shared

• Ádám Reiff

  Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

  18 shared

• Shana Kushner Gadarian

  Syracuse University

  15 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Yale University

  2007