Guoer Liu

Assistant Professor

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. I study the politics of measurement: how governments shape what gets measured and known. My research sits at the intersection of political institutions, technology, and environmental politics, with a regional focus on China. I also work on political methodology, focusing on causal inference and survey experiments.

My book project, Credible Bias, shows how automation in authoritarian regimes turns unavoidable distortion into predictable bias–making biased data politically useful. Using China’s automated air-quality system as the central case, the book demonstrates how fixed measurement rules reshape what rulers can learn and what citizens come to believe.