About

Eric Min is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA. His research focuses on various aspects of political science, contributing to the department's diverse academic environment. As a faculty member, he is involved in teaching and mentoring students, and his work is part of UCLA's broader efforts to advance understanding in political science and related fields.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• History
• Public relations
• Political economy
• Public administration
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Economics
• Operations research
• Positive economics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• A Theory of Wartime Negotiations

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-02-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter presents a theory of wartime negotiations that helps to explain when negotiations are likely to occur, as well as what consequences they have for the future trajectory of conflict. It begins with a discussion of how to define negotiations. The chapter then explains the importance of a concept in the study of negotiations known as the reversion outcome. The reversion outcome refers to the best result a negotiator can hope to realize if negotiations do not reach a mutually acceptable agreement. With those ideas established, the chapter enumerates the specific costs and benefits that shape belligerents' calculations regarding wartime diplomacy. A critical cost to starting negotiations is that they can signal weakness to the enemy and one's own constituency. This, in turn, worsens the range of outcomes a belligerent can obtain when negotiations fail, since abortive talks are likely to be followed by an emboldened enemy or political punishment. The chapter also differentiates between sincere negotiations and insincere negotiations. Finally, it looks at two key factors that help to explain the specific balance of costs and benefits that belligerents perceive when considering when and how to negotiate during war: the level of latent diplomatic pressure that can be activated and placed on belligerents by third parties, and the degree of information culled from fighting.

  PublisherDOI

• Racial Inequality in War

  American Political Science Review · 2025-10-02

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  How does racial inequality shape who dies in war? Focusing on the era of United States military segregation, we argue that discriminatory societal institutions and prejudicial attitudes combined to reduce commanders’ beliefs about Black soldiers’ combat effectiveness. These biased assessments decreased the likelihood that Black soldiers were assigned combat occupational specialties, and that Black combat units received key frontline assignments. However, commanders’ biases also created a desire to preserve white lives. Accordingly, we expect Black soldiers received worse support. These choices shaped soldiers’ risk of death. Analyzing the case of World War I (WWI), we leverage data on over 44,000 infantry fatalities and show that white units incurred four times as many combat fatalities as comparable Black units. However, holding fixed exposure to combat, Black units suffered higher levels of noncombat deaths. Commanders thus deemed Black soldiers insufficiently qualified to fight as equals, but sufficiently expendable to die in war’s least consequential conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Role of Advisors

  2025-08-21

  book-chapter

  Abstract This chapter examines how advisers shape international crises by supplying ideas that influence leaders' decisions. Leaders retain ultimate authority, but advisers actively filter information, frame options, and advocate policies that alter crisis trajectories. They exert influence through three mechanisms: offering counsel, controlling agendas, and applying political pressure. Historical cases like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iraq War demonstrate how advisers shape policy through expertise, credibility, and strategic maneuvering. While leaders depend on advisers for information and analysis, they also design decision-making processes to regulate advisers’ influence. Finally, the chapter underscores how advisers' ideological dispositions, organizational affiliations, and social environments shape their interpretations of global events and, in turn, the policies they promote.

  PublisherDOI

• Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision Making

  International Organization · 2024 · 56 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration

  Abstract Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

  International Organization · 2024-01-01 · 39 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract How do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coalitions and Wartime Diplomacy 1

  2023-07-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  When and why do countries in a wartime coalition engage in diplomacy during hostilities? This chapter establishes a theoretical framework of coalitional diplomacy that highlights each member's private costs and benefits to fighting or seeking a negotiated exit. It argues that the propensity for coalition members to engage in negotiations is a function of the coalition's balance of military contributions, as well as the coalition's battlefield successes and failures. Evidence supporting these claims stem from a large-scale quantitative analysis of two centuries of interstate wars, as well as a close study of the Allies in the Crimean War.

  PublisherDOI

• Autocracies of the World, 1950-2012

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-09-15

  datasetOpen access

  Data and code necessary to replicate the results of the article "Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision-Making" and its supplementary material.

  PublisherDOI

• Painful Words: The Effect of Battlefield Activity on Conflict Negotiation Behavior

  Journal of Conflict Resolution · 2022 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  How does battlefield activity affect belligerents’ behavior during wartime negotiations? While scholars have studied when and why warring parties choose to negotiate, few insights explain what negotiators do once seated at the table. I argue that actors engage in obstinate negotiation behavior to signal resolve when undergoing contentious and indeterminate hostilities. I explore this claim by analyzing all negotiation transcripts and associated daily military operations reports from the Korean War. Using text-based, machine learning, and statistical methods, I show that high levels of movement or casualties in isolation produce clear information on future trends, thus yielding more substantive negotiations, while more turbulent activity featuring high movement and casualties in tandem produces cynical negotiations. Moving past contemporary literature, this study explores micro-level dynamics of conflict and diplomacy, builds a theoretical bridge between two perennial views of negotiation, and provides a framework for studying war by applying computational methods to archival documents.

  PublisherDOI

• Big data

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the origins, interpretations, and limitations of the term "big data." I review several forms of big data that have varying levels of acceptance and usage in international relations research. I enumerate the benefits of big data as a highly granular reflection of real-world behavior as well as a practical manner to study dangerous phenomena. Conversely, I also point out the potential challenges that big data faces in terms of representativeness, causality, misrepresentation, and ethics. The chapter then offers a series of practical recommendations regarding how to overcome technical limitations in processing big data. I conclude by cautioning against viewing big data as inherently better or desirable. As is the case with more familiar forms of data and methods, big data require domain knowledge to be properly used and must be part of a thoughtful research design motivated by compelling questions and theory.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Azusa Katagiri

  Osaka University

  29 shared

• Tyler Jost

  Brown University

  3 shared

• Robert Schub

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  2 shared

• Jonathan Chu

  2 shared

• Maison de la culture de Namur

  1 shared

• Austin Carson

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Goran Djurović

  1 shared

• Beatriz Magaloni

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., International Relations

  New York University

Awards & honors

• 2018 Kenneth Waltz Prize from the American Political Science…