Tanika Raychaudhuri is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, specializing in American politics. Her research interests include political behavior, race and ethnicity, immigration, and economic inequality.

Her dissertation is entitled "The New Democrats: On the Social Roots of Asian American Partisan Political Behavior." The project explores why Asian Americans, a group with some conservative predispositions, supports Democrats in national elections. This research considers existing theories and develops a new theory of “social transmission,” grounded in partisan influence from peers in local contexts. The novel theoretical perspective is motivated by the fact that traditional theories of familial socialization are a poor fit for immigrant households, in which American politics is rarely discussed. Her dissertation tests this theory against alternative explanations using national surveys, qualitative interviews, a longitudinal survey of college students, and an original social media experiment. 

She is also working on several collaborative research projects on topics such as income inequality and the college experience, Puerto Rican political mobilization, and media framings of opioid use. Her research has recently been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

At Princeton, Tanika is a technical research consultant for Princeton Research in Experimental Social Science (PRESS) and a graduate student affiliate of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP). She has served as an Assistant Instructor for undergraduate courses in American politics, quantitative methods, and experimental methods.

Prior to arriving at Princeton, Tanika graduated with a BA in Political Science (minors in Applied Statistics and Anthropology) from the University of Michigan in 2014, with highest honors and highest distinction. While at Michigan, she wrote a senior thesis under the advisement of Professor Nicholas Valentino about the priming effects of Spanish-language political advertising on US Latino voters. As an undergraduate student, she worked in Washington DC as a Congressional Intern for US Representative Rush Holt (2012) and US Senator Frank Lautenberg (2013). She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. 

Selected Publications

Raychaudhuri, Tanika. 2018. “The Social Roots of Asian American Partisan Attitudes” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3(6): 389-410.

Selected Honors and Awards

American Political Science Association Minority Fellowship (2016 – 2017)

Princeton Multi-Center Competitive Dissertation Award (Spring 2018)

Dissertation Development Awards: CSDP (Spring 2017), The Program in American Studies (Spring 2016)

James B. Angell Scholar, University of Michigan (2012 – 2014)

Phi Beta Kappa