Udoi Rateng

Udoi Rateng is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Public Policy and Political Science program. With over a decade of experience as a public affairs researcher in Kenya, across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, he has conducted nationally representative surveys across East Africa, helping to inform policy, governance, and political mobilization strategies.

His research spans public policy and political science, focusing on democratic accountability in developing nations, particularly in Africa. His dissertation examines how politicians' appearances in everyday informal venues shape citizens' trust, perceptions of competence, and voting behavior between elections. Drawing on a two-arena framework that distinguishes relational from performance-based political evaluation, his work combines elite interviews, field observations, and a large-scale survey experiment conducted in Kenya.

Udoi combines quantitative survey and experimental methods with qualitative fieldwork to study questions with both scholarly and policy relevance. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Nairobi and a Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.