Prof Benjamin Rohr
Assistant Professor
9.23, 9/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus
Benjamin Rohr is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is a political and historical sociologist who uses quantitative and computational methods to study the formation and transformation of political organizations.
His current research examines state and party formation in the early American republic (1777–1820) and parliamentary debates in the German Reichstag during the Weimar Republic (1920–1932). He has completed projects on the changing structure of elite recruitment in the American state (1850–2000), career mobility of political elites during China’s reform era (1978–2011), and political discourse in Renaissance Florence (1376–1378).
His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Science History, and Poetics.
He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Before joining HKU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim.
PhD Sociology, University of Chicago
MA Sociology, University of Mannheim
BA Sociology and Philosophy, University of Leipzig
Political sociology
Historical sociology
Organizations
Social networks
Quantitative and computational methods
2026 Charles Tilly Best Article Award from the ASA Comparative-Historical Sociology Section
2023 Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award from the ASA Comparative-Historical Sociology Section – Honorable Mention
2021 Mellon Foundation/Social Sciences Dissertation-Year Fellowship
2020 NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
Rohr, Benjamin, and John Levi Martin. 2025. “The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic.” American Sociological Review 90(4): 726-754.
Winner of the 2026 Charles Tilly Best Article Award from the ASA Comparative-Historical Sociology Section
Rohr, Benjamin. 2025. “Elite Cohesion in the American Administrative State, 1898-1998.” Social Science History 49(2): 505-532.
Bokanga, Maurice, Benjamin Rohr, and John Levi Martin. 2025. “Economic Networks and Political Culture.” Pp. 66-76 in Handbook of Culture and Social Networks, edited by Nick Crossley and Paul Widdop.
Rohr, Benjamin, and John Levi Martin. 2024. “How (Not) to Control for Population Size in Ecological Analyses.”Sociological Methods and Research 51(1): 421-447.
Padgett, John F., Katalin Prajda, Benjamin Rohr, and Jonathan Schoots. 2020. “Political Discussion and Debate in Narrative Time: The Florentine Consulte e Pratiche, 1376-1378.” Poetics 78.
Schoots, Jonathan, Benjamin Rohr, Katalin Prajda, and John F. Padgett. 2020. “Conflict and Revolt in the Name of Unity: Florentine Factions in the Consulte e Pratiche on the Cusp of the Ciompi Revolt.” Poetics 78.