Overview
Frances Cayton is a fourth year PhD Candidate in Government at Cornell University. Her research focuses on questions surrounding democratic backsliding, civil society, and political communication. To do so, I utilize a variety of methods including surveys, interviews, archival work, and observational causal inference techniques. For the 2024-25 AY, she will be visiting Title VIII scholar at Uniwersytet SWPS (Warszawa), in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
Prior to Cornell, she earned her AM in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies from Harvard University and a BA in History and Political Science with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Frances' work has been published or is forthcoming in perspectives on Politics and Government & Opposition, and has been generously supported by the US Department of State and Education, Hoover Institution, Roper Center, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, American Councils, and Cornell Einaudi Center. She also co-organizes the East European Politics Graduate Workshop.
At Cornell, she is an affiliate of the Institute for European Studies, Center on Global Democracy, and Cornell Center for the Social Sciences and a graduate research assistant for the Russian Election Study. In Spring 2024, she was a Junior Visiting Scholar and Brettschneider Exchange Student at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Publications
Blackington, Courtney and Frances Cayton. 2024. "How to Stay Popular: Threat, Framing, and Conspiracy Theory Longevity." Perspectives on Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592723003006