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Speakers: Javier Corrales, Professor of Political Science, Amherst College; Maria Victoria Murillo, Director of ILAS: Professor of Political Science & International Affairs, Columbia University; Kenneth Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Comparative and Latin American Politics, Cornell University; Susan Stokes, Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
Moderated by: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his PhD in political science from Harvard University in 1996. Corrales's research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, ruling parties, democratic backsliding, populism, political economy of development, oil and energy, the incumbent's advantage, foreign policies, and sexuality. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean. His latest book, Fixing Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), focuses on Latin America’s penchant for constituent assemblies and their impact on presidential powers and democracy. His forthcoming book, Autocracy Rising (Brookings Institution Press, winter 2021) discusses the transition to authoritarianism in Venezuela since the 2010s from a comparative perspective. He has taught at the Center for Latin American Research at the University of Amsterdam and at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. He has also offered short courses at the Institute of Higher Studies in Administration (IESA) in Caracas, the School of Government at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, and at the Universidad de Salamanca. In 2000, he became one of the youngest scholars ever to be selected as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He has also been a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Center for Global Development, Freedom House, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Fulbright scholar twice, in 2005 in Caracas and 2016 in Bogotá. Currently, Corrales is also working on two other projects: 1) Populism and Polarization: Incumbents, Expresidents, and Newcomers; and 2) Populism, Religion, and LGBT rights.
Maria Victoria Murillo is the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, and professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2001), Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities (Cambridge University Press 2009), and the co-author of Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voters, Poorer Voters, and the Diversification of Electoral Strategies with Ernesto Calvo (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions (Cambridge University Press, Element in Latin American Politics and Society Series, 2019) with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky. Her research focuses on distributive politics in Latin America, including labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, and economic policy more generally. She is currently working on political party responsiveness to voters and on the conditions that shape the enforcement and stability of institutions. Murillo has taught at Yale University, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Harvard Academy for Area Studies & David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), and at the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as a Fulbright fellow.
Kenneth M. Roberts is Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Comparative and Latin American Politics at Cornell University. He teaches comparative and Latin American politics, with an emphasis on the political economy of development and the politics of inequality. His research is devoted to the study of political parties, populism, and labor and social movements. His research focuses in Latin American Populism, Electoral Volatility, Party System Change, and Social Bases of Political Representation. Roberts’ publications include: Democracy in the Developing World: Challenges of Survival and Significance. Studies in Comparative International Development (2016); Market Reform, Programmatic (De-)Alignment, and Party System Stability in Latin America/a. Comparative Political Studies (2013); Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in Latin America's Neoliberal Era. Ed. Roberts, Kenneth. New York: Cambridge University Press. (2014); The Resurgence of the Latin American Left. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (2011); The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects. Ed. Roberts, Kenneth. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. (2010); and Deepening Democracy?: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1998).
Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright, the American Philosophical Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies; distributive politics; and comparative political behavior. Her co-authored book, Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism (Cambridge, 2013) won best-book prizes from the Comparative Politics (Luebbert Prize) and Comparative Democratization sections of APSA. Among her earlier books, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), received prizes from the APSA Comparative Democratization section and from the Society for Comparative Research. Her articles have appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and the Latin American Research Review.She teaches courses on political development, political parties and democracy, comparative political behavior, and distributive politics.
Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co-editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs