Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield

Profile

Biography

Professor Shair-Rosenfield’s areas of specialisation include comparative politics, political institutions, gender, and Southeast Asia. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina (2012), and she was an associate professor at Arizona State University and then senior lecturer at the University of Essex prior to joining York in 2023.

She is Editor-in-Chief of Political Studies (along with York politics colleagues Monica Brito-Vieira, Graeme Davies, and Daphne Halikiopoulou), has recently convened multiple early career training programmes funded by the British Academy and American Political Science Association, and is a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network.

You can find out more about Sarah's work on her website.

Research

Overview

Professor Shair-Rosenfield’s research primarily investigates factors that shape comparative political institutions, as well as the outcomes affected by them. Her previous and ongoing research seeks to understand the way that political actors are constrained by rules and institutions, and how actors may subsequently affect the structure of those institutions in pursuit of specific policies and outcomes. In addition, this research attempts to identify whether certain traits or characteristics of political actors, whether groups or individuals, can affect the interdependent relationship between actors’ choices and the institutions in which they operate. The primary region on which her recent research and analysis have focused is Asia.

She is a collaborator on the Regional Authority Index, a widely-used measure of decentralised governance from 1960 to 2018, and has been invited to consult with the United Nations and United States Agency for International Development. Her work has been published by Oxford University Press, the University of Michigan Press, and numerous top outlets including Gender & Society, Journal of Politics, Governance, and Political Research Quarterly.

Available PhD research projects

Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield welcomes PhD applications in the following areas:

• Comparative politics
• Gender and politics
• Decentralisation/devolution