William Halm

William (Will) Halm is a first-year Ph.D. student whose research focuses on populist party politics in Western democracies. He considers both why voters elect populists and what makes populists unpopular. Recently, he has researched partisan attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees in Poland, the sociology of racial classification, and the inaccuracy of online sampling. His work on sampling methodology has appeared in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.

Will graduated from Wesleyan University with High Honors in Government and a minor in Data Analysis. His thesis considered how party duopolies and polarization on cultural issues like immigration enabled illiberal parties to severely backslide democracy in Hungary and Poland. Methodologically, he combines quantitative and qualitative tools of causal inference like conjoint analysis, difference-in-difference estimation, structural equation modeling, and small-n case study research. Before coming to Berkeley, he performed survey research at the University of Pennsylvania and content analysis at the Pew Research Center.