Diana Stanescu joined APARC as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2021-2022 academic year. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, at Harvard University. She holds a B.A. in International Relations & Asian Studies from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton University. During 2018-2020 she was a Pre-Doctoral Exchange Scholar in the Department of Government at Harvard.

Her research interests include international trade, regulation, and lobbying with a focus on Japan, using formal and quantitative methods. Her research addresses the overarching question of how bureaucracies shape global economic governance, from a structural and agent-driven perspective. Her dissertation, “The Bureaucratic Politics of Foreign Economic Policymaking,” explains the mechanisms by which stakeholders shape international economic policy through bureaucratic channels of influence.  Additional work looks at the micro-foundations of bureaucratic structure and its consequences for policy; examines the role of individual bureaucrats within domestic and international institutions; and develops micro-level data on bureaucratic careers and appointments.

As a Shorenstein APARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Stanescu further assessed how politicians and interest group representatives maneuver within bureaucratic channels to have influence over foreign economic policy. In particular, she examinedhow bureaucratic-interest group networks help firms obtain market access abroad, with evidence from trade and foreign direct investment in Japan.