Hi! My name is Jordan Duffin Wong and I have a Ph.D in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis. I am also a survey research affiliate with the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

My Research

I study the politics and space of the rural United States. I’m interested in questions about how remoteness, rurality, and the sparseness of political institutions affect people’s dispositions towards politics, from both an institutional and behavioral standpoint. My dissertation, titled The Constellation of American Voters, analyzes the distribution of where Americans live with respect to municipal cleavages in political geography. The abstract is:

More than 130 million Americans live in unincorporated areas, or the spaces outside the boundaries of cities, towns, and villages. Despite this, relatively little attention has been paid to whether, how, and why residents of unincorporated areas differ from their municipality-dwelling counterparts. In this dissertation, I explore the answers to these questions by establishing a new theoretical framework that rigorously defines, bounds, and partitions unincorporated space. Drawing on the near-universe of American voters, I illustrate, with unparalleled precision, where and how Americans have sorted into and out of municipalities, and show that different mechanisms drive these phenomena. Furthermore, I explore the downstream consequences of sorting phenomena for important features of political attitudes and behavior. Finally, I consider this difference temporally as well as spatially by studying municipal disincorporation, or the ability of voters to democratically erase municipalities from existence.

Other Fun Stuff

I’m extremely good at playing a fake plastic guitar. See more in the Music tab):