She focuses on the politics of authoritarian (non-democratic) countries in the digital age; how autocrats constrain collective action through online censorship, propaganda, and responsiveness; how information proliferation influences the ability of authoritarian regimes to conduct surveillance; and how public preferences are arranged and formed. Pan combines experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to examine these questions. Pan’s work has appeared in peer reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science.