Mingyi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Comparative Politics starting from September 2021. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Political Science with minors in European Studies and German from Beloit College in the United States in 2018. Afterward, she finished her master’s study in Political Science at the University of Cologne in Germany in 2020. Before coming to Zürich, she worked as a Graduate Assistant at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics on projects involving topics of decentralization and territorial identities since 2019. 

Her research interests focus on coalition theories relating to party and electoral competition and coalition negotiation in multi-party systems in Western Europe. Her dissertation project will examine the roles of the coalition agreement for governing parties in consensus democracy while incorporating quantitative and text-as-data approaches.