Herbert Kitschelt
Principal Investigator
Herbert Kitschelt is George V. Allen Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He has conducted research on parties and party competition in established Western democracies, Postcommunist Eastern Europe, and Latin America, documented in numerous books and articles.
Email: h3738@.duke.edu
Website
Kerem Yildirim
Research Associate
Kerem Yildirim is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University. His research aims to explain party-voter linkages and clientelism, party competition and public opinion, redistribution, and political communication.
Email: kyildirim@bilkent.edu.tr
Xiaodan Li – PhD Candidate
Xiaodan Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Sun Yat-sen University and a visiting scholar at Duke University. Her research interests include party politics, sub-national politics in Britain and India, coalitions and elections. Specifically, her PhD dissertation looks at how party elite networks affects the state-level pre-electoral coalition formation in India.
Email: lxiaodan93@gmail.com
Paolo Agnolin – PhD Candidate
Paolo Agnolin is a PhD candidate in the department of social and political sciences at Bocconi University and a Visiting scholar at Duke University. His research interests include the political economy of labour and comparative politics in post-industrial societies.
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/paolo-agnolin
Email: paolo.agnolin@unibocconi.it
Mateo Villamizar Chaparro – PhD Student
Mateo Villamizar Chaparro is a PhD student in political economy at Duke’s department of Political Science. His research interests include analyzing the politics of public goods distribution and the transformation of linkage mechanisms and clientelism after migration and violence in developing country contexts.
Email: sv161@duke.edu
Songkhun (Sunny) Nillasithanukroh – PhD Student
Songkhun (Sunny) Nillasithanukroh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research interests include the relationship between business and politics. Specifically, he looks at how businessperson politicians utilize resources from their firms clientelistically during and between elections.
Didem İşçi Kuru – PhD Student
Didem İşçi Kuru is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. Her research focuses on political opposition parties during periods of democratic backsliding, examining strategies employed in such contexts, including the dynamics of party-voter linkages and the formation of electoral alliances.
Email: didem.isci@bilkent.edu.tr
Darren Janz – Undergraduate Student
Darren Janz is an undergraduate student in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research interests include comparative democratization, citizen-elite linkages, administrative geography, multilevel governance, electoral geography, ethnofederalism, party competition, and political behavior.
Email: darren.janz@duke.edu
COUNTRY ANCHORS
AFRICA
Political Parties in Africa Project Team – Multiple Sub-Saharan African Countries
The Political Parties in Africa (PPA) project is based at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and is the regional partner for Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of its broader mission, the PPA seeks to improve the quality of information about political parties that is available to citizens, policy makers and the academic community. The PPA achieves this by collecting data, developing online resources, providing analysis, and partnering with organizations and researchers around the world.
PPA Team Steering Committee Members
Matthias Krönke: Is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, and a researcher at the Afrobarometer Analysis Unit. His research interests include political parties, judicial politics, state bureaucracies, and democratic accountability.
email: mkroenke@afrobarometer.org
website: matthiaskroenke.com
Sarah Lockwood: Is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge and a research affiliate at the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests include protest brokers, social movements, political parties and democratic accountability.
email: sjl55@cam.ac.uk
website: sarahjlockwood.com
Robert Mattes: is a Professor at the University of Strathclyde and Honorary Professor in the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town. He is also a co-founder of and Senior Advisor to Afrobarometer. His research focusses on the intersection of public opinion, political institutions and democratization in Africa.
website: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/mattesbobprofessor/
Jeremy Seekings: Is Director of the Centre for Social Science Research, and Professor of Political Studies and Sociology at the University of Cape Town. His research interests focus on (a) public policy with an emphasis on poverty reduction and social protection and (b) political parties, elections and voting. He has a strong interest in the combination of quantitative and qualitative research.
email: jeremy.seekings@uct.ac.za
website: http://www.sociology.uct.ac.za/jeremy-seekings
Fodé Sarr-Senegal
Fodé Sarr is an independent consultant who collaborates with lecturers & researchers from US universities and national & international organizations. His consultancy works have focused on education in emergencies, political clientelism, political accountability, violent extremism, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, Senegal’s private sector, land ownership, digital financial services, etc. He has worked in Senegal, Democratic Republic of Congo/DRC, Cameroon, Mauritania, and Gambia.
Email: fode73@gmail.com
Shigeyuki Hanaoka – Liberia
Fredline M’Cormack-Hale: is a Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, and Director of Online Learning. A comparativist by training, her research focuses on questions around women’s empowerment and gender equality, state accountability in service delivery (with a focus on health), and democratic consolidation in post-war contexts with a focus on Sierra Leone. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume, “War, Women and Post Conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) (with Josephine Beoku-Betts).
Aaron Hale (Ph.D.): Aaron currently serves as the Head of Business for the Institute for Governance Reform (IGR) in Sierra Leone. He was previously a Fulbright Scholar to Sierra Leone (2017-2019) and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. He holds a Ph.D. (2009) and M.A. (2007) in Comparative Politics and a minor in Research Methodology and Public Policy from The University of Florida, and a M.A.S.S. (Social Science) in Globalization & Environment studies (2001) from Humboldt State University. He has worked as an academic at four different universities as well as a consultant for a variety of international organizations on a variety of development issues in countries such as The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Mali among others.
Email: aahale@gmail.com
Sheetal Sheena Sookrajowa – Mauritius: Sheetal Sheena Sookrajowa is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the Department of History and Political Science at the University of Mauritius and a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her main research interests are ethnicity, political parties, electoral system and public policy. She is currently the Chair of the Research Committee 14: Politics and Ethnicity at the International Political Science Association and also the Workpackage Leader for Mauritius for the project Transloyalties in Citizenship Education at VID Specialized University, Norway.
Email: s.sookrajowa@uom.ac.mu
ASIA
Amanda Rizkallah-Lebanon
Kai Ostwald – Singapore
Kai Ostwald is HSBC Chair and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, where he is also director of the Institute of Asian Research at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He has written on democratization, governance, and political economy in Southeast Asia, focusing on electoral dynamics, party-voter linkages, and party institutionalization.
Email: kai.ostwald@ubc.ca Website: https://sppga.ubc.ca/profile/kai-ostwald/
M. Tahir Kılavuz – Tunisia
M. Tahir Kilavuz is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Marmara University. His research interests include authoritarianism, regime change, religion and politics, and survey analysis, both in the MENA and in the cross-regional setting. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame. He also served as a post-doctoral research fellow in 2019-2020 and as a visiting fellow in 2023 at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative at Harvard University.
Email: mtkilavuz@gmail.com
Meredith Weiss-Malaysia
Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on issues of electoral politics and parties, social mobilization and civil society, institutional reform, the politics of identity and development, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia.
E-mail: mweiss@albany.edu
Website: https://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/faculty/meredith-weiss
Nabila Idris-Bangladesh
Dr Nabila Idris holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge where she studied the politics of social protection policymaking. Her research focus lies at the intersection between development studies and political sociology. She is an adjunct faculty at a university in Bangladesh as well as a visiting fellow at the Open University in the UK. She has previously worked in Bangladesh, Thailand, China, and the UK.
E-mail:nabila.idris@gmail.com
Niloufer A. Siddiqui-Pakistan
Niloufer Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on political parties, political violence, the politics of religion and ethnicity, voters and foreign policy, and the politics of South Asia.
Email: nasiddiqui@albany.edu
Personal website: http://www.niloufersiddiqui.com
Rahul Verma-India
Rahul Verma is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University. His research interests include voting behavior, party politics, political violence, and media. He is a regular columnist for various news platforms and has published papers in Asian Survey, Economic & Political Weekly, and Studies in Indian Politics. His book co-authored with Pradeep Chhibber, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (OUP: New York, 2018) develops a new approach to defining the contours of what constitutes an ideology in multi-ethnic countries such as India. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, US. His doctoral dissertation examines why some political families flourish, and others decline quickly. He completed his MPhil in Political Science from Delhi University, MA in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, and BA from Kirori Mal College, Delhi University.
Email: rahulverma@cprindia.org
Ramesh Ramasamy-Sri Lanka
Ramesh Ramasamy, PhD, teaches Political Science at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. His research interests have been on the quality of government, corruption, public policy, institutional trust, public service delivery and citizenship rights. His recent publications include; Key Challenges of studying public administration in Developing Countries: An Exploration from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (Public Education Affairs, 2022); Institutional Trust Paradox: Understanding the Dynamics of Trust among Different Ethnic Groups in Sri Lanka (Contemporary South Asia, 2022); and Corruption–Poverty Nexus: Evidence from Panel ARDL Approach for SAARC Countries (Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, 2022), The Impact of Corruption, Rule of Law, Accountability, and Government Expenditure on Government Effectiveness: Evidence From Sri Lanka (Journal of Asian African Studies, 2023); Can Ethnic Minority Political Parties Influence Public Policy Process (Millenial Asia, 2024); The Role of Civil Society in Post-War Democracy Building in Sri Lanka (Journal of Civil Society, 2024); Constitutional Amendments, Institutional Tensions (Crisis) and Quality of Governance in Sri Lanka (Routledge, 2024). He is currently editing a book on Popular Struggle (Aragalaya) and Its Implication for Sri Lanka’s Democracy. He has coordinated two waves of the ‘Governance and Trust Survey’ in Sri Lanka under the NORHEAD project on Policy and Governance Studies in South Asia.
Mongolia
Julian Dierkes
Julian Dierkes is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the Univ of British Columbia. A sociologist by training, he has focused much of his research on democratization and mining governance in Mongolia in recent years. He visits Mongolia very regularly and was an election observer in Mongolian national elections from 2008-2017. He hopes to return to that role post-COVID19.
Email: Julian.Dierkes@ubc.ca
Blog: Mongolia Focus (https://blogs.ubc.ca/Mongolia)
Delgerjargal Uvsh
E-mail: duvsh@Central.UH.EDU
Morocco
Eva Wegner
Eva Wegner is Professor of Comparative Politics at Philipps-University Marburg. Her research focuses on political behavior, redistribution, and accountability in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Together with Miquel Pellicer, she is PI of “The Demand Side of Clientelism”, a project investigating how citizens relate to different forms of clientelism in South Africa and Tunisia. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Political Science Review, Governance, and Party Politics, among others.
E-mail: eva.wegner@uni-marburg.de
Miquel Pellicer
Miquel Pellicer is Professor of Inequality and Poverty at the Center for Conflict Studies, Marburg University. He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute and has since held positions at the University of Cape Town, the GIGA Institute for Global and Area Studies in Germany, and Maynooth University in Ireland. He is part of the research group on Inequality and Distributive Politics (https://inq-dp.eu/), which studies topics such as political participation, political clientelism, and political inequality. His research on political clientelism focuses particularly on the citizen side of clientelistic relations. His articles have appeared in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Governance, and the Journal of Development Economics.
E-mail: miquel.pellicer@uni-marburg.de
Ronald D. Holmes-The Philippines
Ronald D. Holmes is professor of political science and development studies at De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines. He is also the president of the independent research organization, Pulse Asia Research Inc. His research focuses on public opinion, comparative politics of Southeast Asia, and distributive politics/public finance.
E-mail: ronald.holmes@dlsu.edu.ph
Siripan Nogsuan-Thailand
Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Siripan received a Master Degree in Comparative Politics from the Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Kyoto University. Her research interests embrace comparative political parties and electoral systems, institutional design, Thai politics, and civic education. Her publications in English include “Electoral Integrity and the Repercussions of the Institutional Manipulations: The 2019 General Election in Thailand” ; The Conundrum of a Dominant Party in Thailand”; “Political Parties in Thailand” (In Jean Blondel and Takashi Inoguchi (eds.). Political Parties and Democracy: Contemporary Western Europe and Asia; Thai Political Parties in the Age of Reform. Her research won an award from the National Research Council of Thailand for the Excellent Research of the year in 2015 and 2019.
Email: nogsuan@gmail.com
Ward Berenschot-Indonesia
Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at KITLV. Studying politics in India and Indonesia, his research focuses on clientelism, citizenship and governance.
E-mail: ward.berenschot@gmail.com
Central and Eastern Europe
Zdenka Mansfeldová-Czechia
Zdenka Mansfeldová is a senior researcher and head of the Department of the Sociology of Politics at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interest is the functioning of modern democracy and its institutions.
From a comparative perspective and mainly based on international comparisons, she deals with parliament and parliamentarians, political elites, forms of interest representation and their transformation in Europeanization,
especially social dialogue at various levels.
Email: zdenka.mansfeldova@soc.cas.cz
Maria Spirova-Bulgaria
Maria Spirova is associate professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations at Leiden University. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and has previously studied political science at the Central European University and the American University in Bulgaria. She works in the area of comparative politics and her research interests include political parties, party patronage and corruption and the democratic representation of ethnic minorities. She is the author of Political Parties in Post-communist Societies: Formation, Persistence, and Change(Palgrave 2007) and co-editor of Party Patronage and Party Government in European Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Clientelism and Democratic Representation in Comparative Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield International 2019). In addition, she serves as book reviews editor for East European Politics.
Email: MSpirova@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Email: MikolaB@ceu.edu
Dr Fabian Burkhardt is a postdoctoral research associate at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany. His research primarily focuses on executive politics in post-Soviet countries.
Email: burkhardt@ios-regensburg.de
Dr Jan Matti Dollbaum leads a junior research group at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, studying party politics in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and beyond.
Email: jan.dollbaum@lmu.de
Levan Kakhishvili is a doctoral fellow in political science at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS) at the University of Bamberg in Germany. His dissertation focuses on the nature of party competition in hybrid regimes with a particular focus on the intersection of programmatic and clientelistic forms of competition. From February 2024, as a postdoctoral researcher, he will join the European Politics Research Group at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Michaela Grančayová-Slovakia
Michaela Grančayová is an adjunct lecturer at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. She holds a PhD in European Studies and Politics and a Master´s degree in Arabic Language and Culture/ English Language and Culture. In her research, Michaela focuses on political parties in Slovakia, the usage of sexual harassment as an authoritarian tool in the MENA region, women´s political participation in the Arab world, digital authoritarianism, Islamophobia in Central Europe and Securitization Theory.
Mikhail (Mykhailo) Minakov is a senior advisor at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute and a philosopher and scholar working in the areas of political philosophy, social theory, international development, and history of modernity. He is also the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Ideology and Politics Journal, of the Kennan Focus Ukraine blog, and of the philosophical web portal Koinè. Minakov is the author of six books, co-author of another six books, and of numerous articles in philosophy, political analysis, and history. Mikhail has over twenty years of experience in research and teaching in the universities of Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.
Email: mikhailminakov1971@gmail.com
Jovan Bliznakovski-Western Balkans
Karlo Kralj-Slovenia
Karlo Kralj is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb. He holds PhD in political science and sociology from Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. His research interests include social movements, political organizing and qualitative research methods.
Email:karlo.kralj@fpzg.hr
Bartul Vuksan-Ćusa-Croatia
Bartul Vuksan-Ćusa is a predoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb. He is a PhD student at Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research interests include populism, political attitudes and voting behavior.
Email: bartul.vuksan-cusa@fpzg.hr
Raimondas Ibenskas is Professor at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. His current research focuses on political party instability in Central and Eastern and Western Europe. He is PI of “Party Instability in Parliaments (INSTAPARTY)”, a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Email: Raimondas.Ibenskas@uib.no
Tõnis Saarts is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Tallinn University (the School of Governance, Law and Society). He has previously served as a visiting lecturer at Vienna University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include political parties and party systems, social cleavages, populism and radical right-wing parties, democracy and democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltic States.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9873-9916
Email: tenissos@tlu.ee
Janis Ikstens – Latvia
Jānis Ikstens is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Latvia. His main research interests include political parties, party finance, political accountability, and voter behavior. He has served as a member of OSCE/ODIHR Core Group of Experts that drafted OSCE/ODIHR-Venice Commission Guidelines on Political Party Regulation.
Email: janis.ikstens@lu.lv
LATIN AMERICA
Ana Belén Benito Sánchez-Dominican Republic
Ana Belén Benito Sánchez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). She holds a PhD. in Political Science from University of Salamanca (USAL), M.S in Public Administration (UPR) and Latin American Studies (USAL), and a B.A in Law (USAL). Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies (CEPC). Her research focuses on Latin American party systems, determinants of clientelism and corruption, and the role of parliamentary and ministerial elites. She is a member of the Women of Legislative Studies Group and country expert for the Dominican Republic at Varieties of Democracy Project.
Email: anabeben@ucm.es
Argentina
Jennifer Cyr is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research explores political representation and political identity in the Andean Region and the Southern Cone. She also writes about qualitative and mixed methods in the social sciences.
Email: jmcyr@utdt.edu
Website: www.jennifercyr.org
Gerardo Scherlis is a Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a research fellow at the National Council of Scientific Research of Argentina. His research focuses on the organization and regulation of Latin American political parties.
E-mail: gscherlis@derecho.uba.ar
Website: http://www.derecho.uba.ar/investigacion/instituto-gioja/gioja/investigadores/gerardo-scherlis.php
Carlos Varetto is a Professor at the University of Saint Martin and a research fellow at the National Council of Scientific Research of Argentina. His research focuses on political parties and electoral systems with special emphasis on subnational and multilevel politics.
E-mail: cvaretto@unsam.edu.ar
Website: https://scholar.google.com.ar/citations?user=mFnT-TMAAAAJ&hl=es
Camilo Filártiga-Callizo-Paraguay
Camilo Filártiga-Callizo is Director of the Public Policy Department and Professor of Political Parties at the Universidad Católica de Asunción in Paraguay. Programme Officer in Electoral Processes at IDEA Internacional. His research explores the political parties organization, political parties system, electoral processes and constitutional issues.
Email: camilo.filartiga@uc.edu.py
Damion Blake-Jamaica
Dr. Damion Blake is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Policy Studies at Elon University. Blake holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA.) and a Master of Science (MSc.) from the University of the West Indies (UWI)Mona campus, Jamaica. He has a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in Political Theory and Governance Studies. He is a Drugs, Security and Democracy research fellow (2011-2012) with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Open Society Foundation. Dr. Blake served as a consultant with the Jamaican government’s Ministry of National Security violence prevention program. Blake’s research areas are: Politics, gangs, organized crime and Urban violence in Jamaica and the Anglo-Caribbean. Blake also provides expert country reports, analysis and affidavits to legal firms (in the US and UK) on immigration matters related to Jamaicans & other Caribbean nationals in deportation proceedings.
Email: dblake3@elon.edu
Ecuador
Paolo Moncagatta is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, in Quito, Ecuador, where he also serves as Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. His research interests include democratization, citizen attitudes toward democracy, and political polarization in Latin America.
Email: pmoncagatta@usfq.edu.ec
Leyre Melchiade is an undergraduate student of International Relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. She has been vice president and founding member of the Political Science and International Relations Student’s Society at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She is interested in gender studies, political culture, and political sociology.
Email: lmelchiade@estud.usfq.edu.ec
Emma Turiño Gonzalez-Honduras
Emma Turiño is a doctoral researcher in the area of Political Science at the University of Salamanca. Her research focuses on the democratization processes in Central America and the Caribbean from the analysis of the political elite, and in parallel, the study of female representation and feminism in the region in comparative perspective with Europe
Email: emmatg@usal.es
Federica Sànchez-Chile
Federica Sánchez is an Assistant Professor at the Departamento de Política y Gobierno, Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile. Her research explores political participation and voting behavior in Chile and Latin America with a particular focus on electoral abstention and the implications of decreasing turnout for developing political systems and democracy.
Email: fsanchez@uahurtado.cl
Lester Ramirez-Honduras
Lester Ramirez is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in Government and Public Administration from the Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset in collaboration with the University Complutense of Madrid and an LLM in International Business from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His work on electoral systems has dealt with political parties, political finance and corruption, legal reform, violence and conflict prevention, electoral institutions, and observation. In addition, Mr. Ramirez has collaborated with civil society organizations, universities, and international development agencies, coordinating and authoring investigations in democratic governance for the last fifteen years.
E-Mail: lester_ramirez@hotmail.com
Luis Fernándo Mack Echeverría-Guatemala
I am a sociologist, with studies in Political Science. I work as a university teacher, but I also develop an intense activity with a diversity of civil society actors who seek training in issues of citizenship such as democracy, elections, political parties, and civic participation, among others. In the media, I am a columnist for a digital newspaper (Plaza Pública) and an analyst on issues of political conjuncture.
Email: luismack@profesor.usac.edu.gt
Maria Teresa Zegada Claure-Bolivia
Sociologist with a Master’s in Political Science (CESU-UMSS). She holds a doctorate in Social and Political Processes in Latin America (PROSPAL) at the University of Art and Social Sciences (U-ARCIS, Chile). She is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Economic and Social Reality (CERES). Professor in undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Universidad Mayor de San (UMSS); in Communication from the Bolivian Catholic University (UCB); at the Bolivian Private University and at CIDES-UMSA. Various books and articles on politics, democracy, social movements, political parties and conflicts in magazines and books specialized in social and political sciences. Researcher and consultant in national and international organizations.
E-mail: zegada_m@yahoo.com
Melany Barragán-Panama
Mélany Barragán holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Salamanca and is currently a lecturer at the University of Valencia. She has been a visiting researcher at universities in Europe, the United States and Latin America and lecturer at the University of Frankfurt (Germany). Her areas of research are institutional quality, comparative politics and political elites. She has worked and written on elites, representation, political parties and institutional quality. She is the author of articles in academic journals, chapters and books. She is involved as an expert in several projects such as the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), the Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project (DALP II), the Bertelsmann Transformation Index and the Manifesto Project.
Email: Melany.Barragan@uv.es
Melina Altamirano-Mexico
Melina Altamirano is an Assistant Professor at the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México (Colmex) in Mexico City. Her research explores the political implications of economic vulnerability and overlapping social inequalities, the political economy of social protection, and the sources of public support for social policy in Latin America.
Email: maltamirano@colmex.mx
Website: http://melinaaltamirano.com/
Rodrigo Barrenechea-Uruguay
I am an Assistant Professor at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In the 2019-2020 academic year, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center Research Cluster on Challenges to Democracy, at Harvard University. My research focuses on populism, political parties, and political representation in Latin America.
E-mail:RODRIGO.BARRENECHEA@ucu.edu.uy
Website: rodrigobarrenechea.com
Sofia Anabell Martinez Osorio-El Salvador
Sofía Martínez Osorio is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Throughout her research career she has focused on issues such as new forms of Populism, Autocracy and Democratic backsliding in Latin America, especially the case of El Salvador. She has participated in different projects related to data collection on political parties and democracy in different countries such as Bolivia, Peru, El Salvador and Guatemala
Email: sofiaosorio@usal.es
Vanessa Beltràn Conejo-Costa Rica
Vanessa Beltrán Conejo is a Political Scientist from the University of Costa Rica, with a Master’s on Gender Studies and Development from FLACSO-Ecuador. Her research focuses on political identities, public opinion and discourse analysis from an interdisciplinary approach. She also explores the political dimension of State´s violence towards women in carceral contexts in Costa Rica and Central America.
Email: beltran86@gmail.com
Vinicius Silva Alves-Brazil
Vinícius Silva Alves holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Brasilia (UnB), with a Visiting Graduate Student stay at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Currently, he is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), serving as Assistant Editor for the Brazilian journal Teoria & Pesquisa. His research, funded by The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), relies on contemporary challenges linking party membership and intraparty democracy and party systems in a comparative perspective. Email: vinicius.silvalves@gmail.com
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/vsalves/home
OECD Countries
Amy Catalinac-Japan
E-mail: amy.catalinac@nyu.edu
Website: https://www.amycatalinac.com/
Don S. Lee-South Korea
Noam Gidron and Roi Zur-Israel
Noam Gidron is senior lecturer in the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on populism and polarization in advanced democracies. Email: noam.gidron@mail.huji.ac.il
Website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/gidron/home
Roi Zur is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. He studies voting behavior, election strategies of political parties, representation, and institutions. Email: roi.zur@essex.ac.uk
Website: www.roizur.com
Sejung Ahn
Rep. of Korea
Sejung is from the Republic of Korea. She is interested in welfare state politics.
Country: Republic of Korea
Christina Corduneanu-Huci
Romania
Cristina is originally from Romania where she was trained in economics and international political economy. Her research interests include democratic consolidation, state capacity, political economy of developing countries and interest mobilization under different regime types.
Countries: Belgium, France, Italy, Moldova, Romania, Senegal
Marco Antonio Fernandez
Mexico
Marco Fernandez worked in the Mexican senate prior to grad school and was a guest lecturer at ITAM in Mexico City. His dissertation focused on the political determinants of education spending and its allocation among the different education levels in Mexico. During 2008 he worked in the Policy Analysis Unit of the Mexican Presidency.
Email: marco.a.fernandez@duke.edu
Countries: Spain and Philippines
Kent Freeze
Canada
Kent comes from Alberta, Canada. He has substantive interests in Chinese politics and the political economy of developing countries.
Country: Canada
Kiril Kolev
Bulgaria
Kiril Kolev iis originally from Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in Economics from Whittier College in Whittier, CA. His research interests focus on the effect of multinational organizations on domestic politics. In this project, he is responsible for website design, data management and online support, in addition to being a country manager.
Countries: Australia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, New Zealand, Sweden, United Kingdom
Dan Kselman
United States
Dan specializes in comparative politics and formal theoretic methodology. His dissertation addressed patterns of political party competition in Turkey and the broader Middle East.
Damon Palmer
United States
Damon Palmer is originally from New Mexico in the southwestern United States, but has had a peripatetic background, living at different points of his life in Bangladesh, California, London, and New York city. He is interested in the political economy of liberalization and globalization and in political parties and party systems.
Countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Jan Pierskalla
Germany
Jan’s fields of Interest include Comparative and International Political Economy and Methods.
Country: Mauritius
Sinziana Popa
Romania
Sinziana Popa received a M.A. in Economics at Duke University and a B.A. degree from the American University in Bulgaria. Her dissertation research analyzed national policies governing the operations of foreign companies in transition economies.
Email: Sinziana.Popa@duke.edu.
Countries: Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Kenya.
Philipp Rehm
Germany
Philipp Rehm holds a Master’s degree from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. His research interests include political economy and political behavior. Philipp’s dissertation explored the determinants of social policy preference and the interaction of citizen preferences and social policy making.
Countries: Austria, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Switzerland.
Gustavo Rodriguez
Costa Rica
Gustavo was born and raised in San José, Costa Rica. He majored in Economics and worked in strategy and product development for two U.S. companies conducting business in Latin America before earning an MBA and an MA in International Relations at Yale University. In the last five years prior to coming to Duke, he was on Wall Street where he worked at the New York Stock Exchange in the International Department, developing sales pitches to non-U.S. companies that were seeking to “go public” on the world’s largest stock market. In this position, he worked primarily with Latin American corporations. These transactions led to a deeper interest in the joint politics of democratization and privatization in developing countries, as well as the mechanics of market-based reform and international trade agreements. Gustavo’s home region of Central America is undergoing just one such variety of commercial and political reorganization under the CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). At Duke he was a student of the comparative political economy of development and trade.
Arturas Rozenas
Lithuania
Arturas is interested in comparative politics and political methodology.
Countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Finland, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Mattew Singer
United States
Matthew Singer (PhD, Duke) is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. His work primarily focuses on electoral behavior and public opinion with an emphasis on questions of electoral accountability and economic voting. He has done fieldwork in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru and his work has been published in Electoral Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and the Development Policy Review.
Countries: Denmark and Norway, Latin America (supporting Juan Luna and David Altman).
Lenka Siroky
Czech Republic
Lenka is originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, where she was trained in political sociology. After that, she lived and studied in Budapest, Chicago and Boston before coming to Duke. She is interested in democratic consolidation in formerly communist countries. Her dissertation was about radical right parties and populism in Eastern Europe.
Website
Countries: Albania, Czech Rep., Israel, Mozambique, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine.
Yi-ting Wang
Taiwan
Yi-ting is from Taiwan. She is primarily interested in political participation and political culture.
Countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Taiwan.
