Perry Carter is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a graduate fellow in the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. His research concentrates on the intersection of international and domestic politics, drawing on with a particular focus on the role played by transnational group identities in post-imperial contexts, especially in the former Soviet Union. Perry also has a particular interest in the application of network theory to political processes, ranging from the social spread of narratives to the mechanics of electoral clientelism.  

His dissertation examines the consequences of territorial loss for the structure of domestic politics, using a mixed-methods approach based on a combination of formal decision modelling, survey and laboratory experiments, geographical causal identification, and field and archival work in Georgia and the Caucasus to establish links between individual behavior and system-level outcomes. Other ongoing projects explore the role of social structure in determining the incentives politicians face to subvert formal election rules through vote-buying and patronage, and the relationship between economic vulnerability and group identification in political cognition. Perry is also the joint author, along with Dahyun Choi, of the R package scR, which implements a general analogue to power analysis for machine learning in the social sciences.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Perry was a music educator and orchestral musician, performing with top orchestras across New Zealand. He has continued his passion for teaching while at Princeton, and was the recipient of a Graduate School Teaching Award in 2022 in recognition of his work precepting for both graduate and undergraduate methods classes.

Selected Publications

Perry Carter, Anne-Marie Brady & Evgeny Pavlov (2016) Russia’s “smart power” foreign policy and Antarctica, The Polar Journal, 6:2, 259-272.