Cecilia Hyunjung Mo

About

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellow for 2015-16. She specializes in behavioral political economy and comparative politics. Her scholarly contributions can be broadly classified as being of two types. First, she is substantively interested in understanding democratic citizenship and the development of informed interventions aimed at meeting contemporary challenges. The health of a democratic polity rests on the public possessing a sufficient level of trust in government, political efficacy, civic engagement, tolerance, and respect for human rights. Her research centers on how norms and values of democratic citizenship can be cultivated and on both understanding and responding to the following challenges to democratic citizenship: (1) group-based intolerance; (2) irrational political participation; (3) slavery or human trafficking; and (4) poverty and inequality. Second, she sheds new light on important policy-relevant research by viewing actors as boundedly rational, the notion that, in decision making, the rationality of individuals is limited by the cognitive constraints of their minds and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions.