Welcome! I am Yehzee Ryoo, a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and an M.S. student in Statistics (Applied Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I study the domestic politics of international conflict: what drives public preferences in international affairs, and, in turn, how public opinion shapes and restrains democratic countries' military and foreign policies. My research focuses on the normative and moral side of foreign policy-making, spanning political psychology, international security, and human rights.

My dissertation examines the moral effects of foreign civilian deaths in war. Contrary to theoretical expectations of high moral sensitivity and aversion to innocent casualties, democratic publics have shown starkly inconsistent, and at times even insensitive, reactions to foreign civilian deaths. I argue that citizens do not respond uniformly to casualty information, such as the number of deaths, the victims' nationality, or the strategic benefits of the operation; instead, they subjectively interpret its morality — how immoral the harm is. The perceived intentionality to harm civilians and the perceived vulnerability of those civilians together shape public support for military operations.

Beyond this project, my work explores how citizens form preferences about conflict and cooperation based on a partner's regime type, how the deterrent effect of nuclear threats operates specifically through the public's perception, and how economic connectedness influences states' foreign policy positions on global human rights. I draw on a range of methods, including survey experiments, network analysis, text-as-data and large language models, time-series analysis, and causal inference.

You can find my Research and a copy of my CV here. Please feel free to reach out to me!