Megan Kurten is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clinton School of Public Service, where she works on research projects with the Open Governance Lab.
Her research interests involve how electoral processes and information environments affect both public participation in politics and effective policy reform. She is particularly interested in security studies, focusing on the political processes and institutions that affect security reform and evaluating the quality of security policies targeting organized violence, crime, and cybersecurity. Her current projects assess how domestic electoral competitiveness and international diplomatic pressure impact anti-organized crime policy reform. She also studies how information environments affect civilian polarization and state-civilian conflict, exploring the institutional and informal dynamics that shape governance, security, and democratic participation.
Kurten’s work has been published in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. She has collaborated on projects on Cuban elections and electoral participation, use of LLMs to classify social media incivility, and the intersection of insurgent violence and organized crime. She has previously taught courses on Comparative Politics, Political Conflict, and Public Policy.
Kurten is pursuing her Ph.D. in Government from American University, and she holds a Master of Public Service degree from the Clinton School of Public Service. She is a member of the American Political Science Association and Women in Conflict Studies group.