Cecilia Y. Sui

Hi! I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, co-advised by Prof. Jacob Montgomery and Christopher Lucas.

My research examines how changing media technologies reshape political communication and how citizens respond to political messages in contemporary information environments. I am particularly interested in how political candidates adapt to new media platforms and the tradeoffs these adaptations create for political persuasion. My current work studies the rise of influencer-style campaigning on short-form video, asking how informal and personal styles of communication reshape voters' perceptions of politicians.

I combine computational methods with audiovisual experiments to study these questions at scale and with causal leverage. I use techniques from machine learning and generative AI to measure political communication across text, languages, and audiovisual media and to construct tightly controlled experimental stimuli, enabling researchers to isolate communication features that are typically confounded in observational data.