Yeilim Cheong
Yeilim Cheong is the Korea Foundation Endowed Assistant Professor, beginning in Fall 2025. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
Focusing on Korea and the Asia-Pacific, Yeilim studies the long-term trajectories of opposition groups before and after democratization, as well as the effects of past authoritarian rule in young democracies. Her book project draws on an original dataset to examine why and how, after a country transitions to democracy, some former pro-democracy opposition movements, leaders, or groups develop into durable political parties and achieve electoral success, while others quickly dissolve or decline. In a related project, she explores when and how these surviving opposition successor parties (OSPs) contribute to variation in democratic resilience and erosion, as well as patterns of political polarization. In other research, she uses survey and micro-level data to analyze trends in polarization over time and to examine the factors that shape various forms of political opposition under autocracy.
