Jennifer Pan
Jennifer Pan, PhD
- Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
- Professor of Communication
- Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Sociology
- Stanford Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
- Stanford Affiliate at the Cyber Policy Center
Biography
Jennifer Pan is a Professor of Communication and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. Pan uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule. How political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age. How preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.
Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020) shows how China's pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program, Dibao, for repressive purposes. Her work has appeared in peer reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science.
She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government.
