Deshdeep Dhankhar is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also a Graduate Fellow at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is additionally an Affiliated Fellow with the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi), an initiative of the Max Weber Stiftung in India.
His research sits at the intersection of Comparative and American politics, focusing on party politics, political institutions, and multi-level governance. Methodologically, he integrates causal inference, survey experiments, original data collection, and field-based qualitative research.
Before his doctoral work, he was involved in research at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, and Lokniti - Programme for Comparative Democracy CSDS, India.