Fellow
Associate professor of Government & Politics, University of Maryland
Fiona Shen-Bayh is an Associate Professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland. She studies the politics of authoritarian regimes, specifically the legal and judicial instruments of power.
Her recent work examines the challenges of promoting access to justice and the legacies of autocratic rule. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Law and Society Series) examines these themes in the context of postcolonial Africa. In 2023, it won the Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize in the Comparative Study of Democracy & Autocracy.
Publications:
Choi, D. and Shen-Bayh, F. 2025. How Oppositions Turn Authoritarian. Journal of Democracy
Ríos-Figueora, J. and Shen-Bayh, F. 2025. Courts in the Global South. Annual Review of Political Science
Kitagawa, R., and Shen-Bayh, F. 2024. Measuring Political Narratives in African News Media: A Word Embeddings Approach. The Journal of Politics
Choi, D., Harris, J. A., and Shen-Bayh, F. 2022. Ethnic Bias in Judicial Decision-Making: Evidence from Criminal Appeals in Kenya. American Political Science Review
Shen-Bayh, F. 2018. Strategies of Repression: Judicial and Extrajudicial Methods of Autocratic Survival. World Politics
Shen-Bayh, Fiona, Autocratic Legalism, in Anne Wolf (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics (online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Jan. 2024)
Website:
http://www.fionashenbayh.com/