John Ahlquist

John Ahlquist is a Professor and Associate Dean at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, where he directs the Pacific Leadership Fellows Program. His research examines the interplay between advanced capitalism and democratic governance, with emphasis on distributional conflict and labor mobilization.

His research interests span Political Economy, Distributional Conflict, and Applied Statistics, focusing on socio-economic infrastructure development, unemployment insurance systems, and political mobilization of wage earners. Current projects include field experiments on skill-specific unemployment benefits and rebuilding social data infrastructure through distributed 'socio-economic weather stations'.

Ahlquist's scholarly output demonstrates consistent engagement with political economy trends, particularly in experimental analysis of welfare state dynamics and inequality. His work bridges quantitative methodology with policy-relevant questions about democratic resilience.

• Co-author of In the Interest of Others (Princeton University Press, 2013)
• Co-author of Maximum Likelihood Strategies for Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
• Contributor to American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis

As an educator, Ahlquist has mentored numerous PhD students across institutions including UCSD, Florida State, and Georgia Tech. His teaching portfolio includes Comparative Social Welfare Policy, Politics of Economic Inequality, and advanced statistics courses. He maintains active research collaborations with scholars at Oxford, Stanford, Duke, and Harvard.

Ahlquist leads initiatives connecting academic research with policy implementation through the Pacific Leadership Fellows Program, focusing on practical applications of political economy research in global governance contexts.