Justin Daniels is a DPhil (PhD) student in International Relations at Somerville College and DPIR, where his research focuses on political behaviour and elite and public opinion in democracies as well as indoctrination and protest in authoritarian regimes.
His current research focuses on politicians' and voters' conceptions of democracy, where they diverse, and implications for democratic resilience and decline using surveys, computational text analysis, and interviews. This research is generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme.
Justin is a non-stipendiary lecturer in politics at Lady Margaret Hall and a doctoral research assistant for Professor Katerina Tertytchnaya. In addition, he is the editorial assistant of the St Antony's Series at Palgrave Macmillan and administers the Department's centralised marking scheme for core undergraduate politics papers. From 2025–26, he was the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Political Review.
In 2025, Justin received an MPhil in Comparative Government at St Antony's College, Oxford. His thesis focused on how autocrats employ strategies of indoctrination following mass nonviolent protest. From 2020 to 2023, he was assistant editor of the Journal of Democracy. In 2020, he received a BA in French with honours in democracy, development and the rule of law from Stanford University.
Publications
- “Why Germany's Mainstream Parties Have Lost Their Way” (with Luca Siepmann). 22 September 2026. Journal of Democracy.
- “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). 2025. Perspectives on Politics 23 (special issue no. 3): 1128–29.
- “Controlling the Threat from Below: Mass Mobilization and Indoctrination in Autocracies, 1946–2021.” 2025. MPhil thesis. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.
- “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, Stanford University.