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 centers on opposition party politics and democratic resilience at the intersection of Comparative and American politics. He studies how institutional design, federalism, and legal frameworks shape political competition, governance, and opposition strategies, drawing on comparative cases of India and the United States. His multilevel approach anchors his work by examining how the legal and procedural architectures of democracy shape the choices of parties, voters, and institutions at the local, state, and federal (national) levels. Methodologically, he combines causal inference designs, survey and conjoint experiments, legal and doctrinal analysis, 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.