Xingyuan Zhao

Political Science

Research on the politics of AI governance, censorship, media representation, and international AI competition.

Presented at MPSA 2026AI PolicyState LegislationAI Governance

How AI Is Governed: LLM-Driven Entity and Relation Extraction on State AI Bills

What predicts how U.S. states define and regulate AI in their legislation? This project extracts regulated entities from state AI bills, predicts policy adoption, and evaluates model bias on the corpus.

  • An agentic RAG pipeline extracts regulated entities from state AI legislation; a fine-tuned model predicts policy adoption and quantifies model bias on the corpus.
  • The project studies variation in AI legislation while making AI-assisted policy analysis scalable across corpora and domains.
Political CommunicationMedia BiasDemocratic BackslidingCausal Inference

Media Bias and Democratic Backsliding

This paper estimates whether presidential social-media posts about crime causally shift regional news coverage, treating elite rhetoric as an intervention in a causal design.

  • Estimates the causal effect of presidential social-media rhetoric on regional news coverage with a staggered difference-in-differences design.
  • Links political rhetoric, media representation, and conditions under which voters support disruptive political change.
Export ControlsAI CompetitionInternational Political Economy

Hardware Restrictions and AI Competition: The Effect of NVIDIA GPU Export Restrictions on AI Benchmark Performance

Did U.S. export controls on high-end GPUs slow China's AI development? This paper estimates the effects of successive export-control waves on Chinese AI model performance over time.

  • Builds a developer-level monthly panel from the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard and estimates the effect of successive export-control waves with staggered difference-in-differences and mechanism-specific extensions.
  • Finds no robust negative net effect on Chinese benchmark performance across the main estimators; mechanism tests are more consistent with adaptation than with suppression.