Research

Research by Yiwen Zhang on inequality, comparative political economy, social policy, public opinion, computational social science, and AI governance.

Research

My research sits at the intersection of inequality, comparative political economy, computational social science, and AI governance. I study how welfare institutions, economic insecurity, and technological change shape political behaviour, public opinion, and policy-relevant attitudes.

Doctoral Research

The Politics of Unequal Protection: Three Essays on Welfare States, Economic Insecurity, and Technological Change
Doctoral research project. This project develops the concept of expected residual loss to explain how institutional protection shapes the translation of economic insecurity into political demand.

Working Papers

Aggregate Agreement Is Not Validity: Three Levels of Evidence for LLM-Simulated Public Opinion in China and Britain
Working paper; presented at APSA 2026. This paper develops claim-dependent validation for synthetic survey respondents and identifies cross-public structural substitution in redistribution attitudes.

Hung, Ho Ting, Nachiket Midha, Victor Y. Wu, and Yiwen Zhang. 2026. “Multi-dimensional Bias in Modeling Multi-dimensional Preferences: Evaluating the Ability of Synthetic Agents to Replace Human Participants in Conjoint Experiments.” Working paper / arXiv preprint.
arXiv

Publications and Policy Reports

Burland, Patrick, and Yiwen Zhang. 2025. “Seeing beyond the negative: An examination of key variables in the different reasons for the decisions not to formally recognise people as survivors of modern slavery.” Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, University of Oxford, in collaboration with IOM UK. Policy report.
Project link