Ikromjon Tuhtasunov is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. A scholar of comparative political behavior and authoritarian governance, his research examines how participatory institutions shape state legitimacy in nondemocratic settings. Much of Ikromjon’s work is motivated by the contemporary experience of Uzbekistan, where recent governance reforms have created new opportunities to study citizen–state relations under authoritarian rule.

His dissertation combines survey experiments, administrative data, and qualitative interviews to investigate how participatory budgeting influences public perceptions of state legitimacy. A central theme of his research is how institutional design, participatory experiences, and variation in participatory outcomes structure citizen judgments toward the state. At his current university, Ikromjon has served as both an instructor of record and a teaching assistant for several courses in the department.