Minh Trinh

Faculty Affiliate

Minh Trinh is a Faculty Affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB and Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Minh has been involved with GOV/LAB since 2015 and has contributed to various projects by GOV/LAB and GOV/LAB-affiliated faculty. His first project at the GOV/LAB involved investigating the factors affecting Ugandan youths’ political participation and vote choice. He has also worked on another project studying the impact of COVID-19  policies in Sierra Leone.

Minh received his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in May 2022. Since then, he has served as a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and as Assistant Professor of Government at Purdue University. Prior to MIT, Minh obtained a BA in Government and an MA in Statistics from Harvard University. A native of Vietnam, he has also spent time living in Singapore, Germany, Poland, and Australia.

Minh’s current research focuses on the inner workings of durable authoritarian regimes, examining both authoritarian control from the top and (sometimes) voluntary compliance from the bottom. His book project documents the practice of falsifying internal government statistics by bureaucrats and officials in autocracies and its impact on top-down authoritarian governance. He also has various other projects studying elections, propaganda, and historical state development.