Justin Daniels is a DPhil (PhD) student in International Relations at DPIR, where his research focuses on political communication and electoral campaigns in democracies as well as indoctrination and protest in authoritarian regimes. He is editor-in-chief of the Oxford Political Review and editorial assistant of the St Antony's Series at Palgrave Macmillan and of Perspectives on Politics. In addition, he administers the Department's centralised marking scheme for core undergraduate politics papers.
His current research focuses on how mainstream-party politicians use rhetoric laden with notions of democracy and democratic backsliding in campaigns. The final project will test whether these narratives resonate with voters through survey experiments, interviews, and election data. This research is generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme.
In 2025, he received an MPhil in Comparative Government at St Antony's College. His thesis focused on how autocrats employ strategies of indoctrination following mass nonviolent protest. Before coming to Oxford, Justin was assistant editor of the Journal of Democracy. He received his undergraduate in 2020 from Stanford University with honours in democracy, development and the rule of law.
Publications
- “Democratization and Taxation in the Global South: An Introduction to the Symposium on Lucy Martin’s Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States” (with Anne Wolf). Perspectives on Politics 23 (special issue no. 3): 1128–29.
- “Putin Has Assembled an Axis of Autocrats Against Ukraine.” 3 March 2023. Foreign Policy.
- “The Risks of Engagement with China’s Sister Cities” (with Ariane Gottlieb). 6 June 2023. Power 3.0 blog, NationalEndowment for Democracy.
- “Lessons from Sri Lanka’s Constitutional Reform,” Democracy & Society 19 (2021–22): 16–18.
- “Defining ‘Disinterest’: U.S. Influence and Impact on the Creation and Reform of the Congo, 1876–1913.” 2020.Undergraduate thesis. Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.