Four new colleagues join the ERC-funded project PROTECT

PROTECT is an ERC-funded project examining how local economic, environmental, and sociocultural change shapes public attitudes toward protectionism and is lead by Professor Lisa Dellmuth. The new staff members include two postdoctoral researchers and two PhD students.

Postdoctoral researchers

Hongyi She joins us from a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, having completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester in 2025, with research on the individual-level sources of opposition to free trade.

" What I find most interesting is how economic and cultural considerations interact in shaping protectionist attitudes, and how information shapes that interaction. I hope to help resolve a central puzzle in open economy politics: why regional economic shocks predict protectionist behavior even though individual-level surveys often find only weak effects of personal economic self-interest on protectionist attitudes."

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Muzhou Zhang joins from a postdoctoral position at Aarhus University and completed his PhD at the University of Essex in 2024, specializing in cross-national survey research, experimental design, and spatial econometrics.

"Why do many consumers 'irrationally' support trade protectionism that denies them access to affordable goods? I expect my work in the project to produce widely reusable cross-national data on the level of public support for various protectionist measures in different places. I also hope my work will disentangle causation from correlation underlying place-based public support for trade protectionism."

PhD students

Viola Pulkkinen brings a background in political psychology and five years of professional experience in global migration and development policy, including roles with international think tanks and the UN Development Programme in Egypt.

"I hope to uncover something more universal about political psychology under the pressures of globalization. The most exciting puzzle to me is the gap between objective local shocks and the subjective narratives through which those shocks are framed. This space is highly vulnerable to elite manipulation and misinformation. "

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Torkel Gure brings nearly three years of experience as a research assistant at Stockholm University, where he built deep expertise collecting and preparing subnational contextual and survey data for statistical analysis.

"The complex dynamics of support for protectionism are very intriguing, and PROTECT will enable us to tease out previously unexplored causal chains in new local contexts. My hope is also that the insights I can bring out through the project can help policymakers design trade policy that is fair, resilient and that has broad support."

Welcome, Hongyi, Muzhou, Torkel, and Viola!

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For more info: PROTECT — Protectionism in Place: Explaining How Subnational Change Affects Public Support for Protectionism