Postdoctoral Fellow in
Peace and Conflict Research
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(2021-2023)

email: austinmitchellphd[at]gmail.com
Twitter: @ausmitchell

Welcome to my site.  私のサイトへようこそ。

I study and teach political economy, political development, and authoritarian politics.  I am currently an Assistant Professor at Hiroshima University in the International Economic Development Program and the Graduate School of Innovation and Practice for Smart Society​.  

My primary research interests regard why representative institutions emerge within authoritarian regimes and how these institutions influence regime budgets in both contemporary and historical settings.   My research focuses on topics such as A) how regime finance and debt influences the introduction of elections in contemporary dictatorships B) political liberalization and finance in historical regimes and C) how local level representative institutions can improve regime stability and state capacity.  I have multiple projects on these topics which are at various stages of production or under review at journals. 

Regime type and regime finance
My work on the emergence of elections in contemporary dictatorships was published at the Journal of Peace Research (available here by open access). My work on finance in late modern empires was published at the Journal of Historical Political Economy (available here).  My research on the development of democratic institutions, co-authored with Masaaki Higashijima (University of Tokyo), is conditionally accepted (here) at Comparative Political Studies.
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Economic development
My co-authored projects study development issues such as economic growth and institutional change, with a focus on historical Japan and contemporary India.  Weiwen Yin and I published a paper on local economic growth during the Edo Period of Japan at Explorations in Economic History (available here).  We also have a new working paper with Minzhao Wang (Peking University) on state-building at the end of Japan's Sengoku Period.  Suparna Soni and I have published a couple articles on gender and development in India including a study on dowry murders at the Journal of International Development (available by open access) and another paper at Information Polity in (available here) on how e-government kiosks improve women's access to internet services.    I have also published other co-authored projects including a meta-analysis of FDI by regime type in International Studies Quarterly (available here), an education policy analysis of critical thinking skills (available here), and a recent discussion in PS: Political Science and Politics (available here) of how to continue conducting research when access to the field is limited .

In the classroom, I am a highly effective teacher because I am committed to my students' learning (just ask my students).  I have four years of experience preparing and teaching my own courses.  I have prepared and taught courses on Comparative Democracy, Environmental Politics, Introductory Research Methods, American National Government, and State and Local Government.  In addition to my expertise, I trained very broadly during my four graduate degrees which allows me to teach across many subjects.  I was also a first generation college student which is part of why I am devoted to my students' success.

I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Peace and Conflict Research in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2023-2024).  Before I moved to Norway, I held a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2023) at the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan (with Masaaki Higashijima).  From 2020-2021, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar.  I earned my PhD in Political Science from Texas A&M University, College Station, in August of 2020.  I attended the EITM Summer Institute at the University of Michigan in 2015.  I also hold an MPA in International Environmental Policy from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.