Barry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Pittsburgh and former chair of the Department of Political Science. He is the author of two major monographs, Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America and The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil as well as many articles in political science journals. His early work focused on institutions in Latin America, especially in Brazil; more recent work concentrates on the relationship between social context and political behavior.
Peter Andreas is a professor in the Department of Political Science and at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. His research focuses on the intersection of security, political economy, and cross-border crime. Published works include Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2006), Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Cornell University Press, 2nd ed. 2009), and Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (co-editor, Cornell University Press, 2010). Andreas is currently completing a book on the politics of smuggling in American History, titled Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Lisa Baldez is Associate Professor of Government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Her work on gender and politics in Latin America and in the United States has appeared in numerous journals, including Comparative Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly and The Journal of Legal Studies. She is one of the founding editors, with Karen Beckwith, of Politics & Gender.
Nancy Birdsall is the Center for Global Development’s founding president. She has also served as executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, and Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly journals and monographs. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals. Birdsall received her Ph.D. from Yale University and her M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Daniel M. Brinks is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Comparative Politics and Public Law. His current project explores constitutional and judicial transformations in Latin America since the 1970s. Some of his previous projects address the courts’ response to police violence in South America, the use of courts and law to enforce social and economic rights in the developing world, judicial independence, and the role of informal norms in the legal order. Brinks has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.
Miguel Carreras is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science from the Sorbonne University and an M.A. in International Studies from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). His current research agenda has two main components: the impact of exposure to crime on political behavior; and the rise of outsider presidents in Latin America. His previous research is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies and Latin American Research Review.
Néstor Castañeda-Angarita is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned a B.A. in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include comparative political economics, legislative politics, and formal theory. His doctoral dissertation addresses the influence of special interest groups and legislative coalitions on fiscal politics and deficit reduction in Latin America.
Christopher Chambers-Ju is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, “Teachers’ Unions, Governing Coalitions, and Education Policy, 1980–2010” explains different patterns of electoral participation and contentious politics by teachers’ unions, and the policy consequences of these patterns in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.
Ruth Berins Collier is Heller Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley. Her research has focused on the interplay of regime change and forms of popular participation and has included comparative analyses of Latin America, Africa, and Europe. She is the author of Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 1945–1975; Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics; The Contradictory Alliance: State-Labor Relations and Regime Change in Mexico; Paths Toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America; and Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America.
Maria Lorena Cook is a professor in the Department of International and Comparative Labor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. She is the author of The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights (Penn State Press, 2007) and Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers’ Movement in Mexico (Penn State Press, 1996); co-editor of The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1994) and Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America (ILR, Cornell, 1994); and author of numerous articles and chapters on Latin American labor politics.
Javier Corrales is professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the co-author of Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Brookings Institution Press, 2011), winner of the Foreign Affairs’ award for the Best International Relations Book on the Western Hemisphere for 2011. Corrales is also the co-editor of The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press 2010), and author of Presidents without Parties: the Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (Penn State Press 2002).
Jennifer Cyr is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University and has a Master of Arts in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University. Her research centers on political parties, political institutions, and processes of democratization in the Andean region, specifically in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. She has authored or co-authored several publications in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. She is currently completing a dissertation tentatively entitled, “From Collapse to Comeback? The Fates of Political Parties in Latin America.”
Jorge I. Domínguez is Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University, vice provost for international affairs, special advisor for international studies to the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He is the author or co-author of many books and articles on domestic and international politics in Latin America and the Caribbean. His most recent books include La política exterior de Cuba, 1962–2009; Consolidating Mexico’s Democracy: The 2006 Presidential Campaign in Comparative Perspective; The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict, 2nd ed.; Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America, 3rd ed. A past president of the Latin American Studies Association, he currently serves on many editorial boards.
Thad Dunning is Associate Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. His first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association. His current research on ethnic and other cleavages draws on field and natural experiments and qualitative fieldwork in Latin America, India, and Africa.
Angelica Duran Martinez is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Brown University. She obtained a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship. She has been a Fulbright Fellow at the United Nations Secretariat and a consultant for the UNODC, the UNDP, and Global Integrity. Her dissertation analyzes the relationship between drug trafficking and violence in Colombia and Mexico, and has been funded by the United States Institute of Peace, the Social Science Research Council, and the Open Society Foundation.
Kent Eaton is Professor and Chair of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His articles on decentralization and federalism have appeared in Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, Politics and Society, Security Studies, and World Politics. He is also the author/editor of several recent monographs on decentralization, including Making Decentralization Work: Democracy, Development and Security (Lynne Rienner Press, 2010), The Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook (USAID, 2009), and The Political Economy of Decentralization Reforms: Implications for Aid Effectiveness (The World Bank, 2010).
Sujatha Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, October 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, April 2010). Her most recent book is Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, September 2011).
Barbara Geddes, who earned her Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley, has written about autocratic politics, regime transition, bureaucratic reform and corruption, political bargaining over institutional change, and research design. Her current research focuses on institutional choice in dictatorships, supported by an NSF grant for the collection of information about dictatorial politics. Her publications include Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politic (2003); Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (1994); and “What Causes Democratization?” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science. She teaches Latin American politics, authoritarian politics, and research design at UCLA.
Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Visiting Associate Professor for Brazil Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, political representation, political economy, and religion and politics. She is author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) and Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge 1996); editor of Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), co-editor (with Scott Mainwaring) of The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America (Cambridge 2005); and author of numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Kathryn Hochstetler is CIGI Chair of Governance of the Americas in the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on civil society and social movements in Brazil and Argentina, the Mercosur free trade area, and in United Nations conferences and negotiations. Her most recent book is the award-winning Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke University Press, 2007, with Margaret Keck).
Ollie A. Johnson III is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, Brazilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964, was published in 2001. He co-edited Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era in 2002. Johnson has conducted extensive research on Black political groups and social movements in the United States and Latin America. His current research focuses on Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin American politics.
Mark P. Jones (Ph.D. University of Michigan, B.A. Tulane University) is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s Fellow in Political Science, and Chairman of the Department of Political Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He also has been a visiting professor at several universities in Latin America, including the Universidad de San Andrés and Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Argentina and the Universidad de la República in Uruguay. Jones’s research focuses on the impact of democratic institutions on elections, elite and mass behavior, governance, and representation.
Sebastian Karcher is a Ph.D. Candidate in political science at Northwestern University. His main research interests are the politics of business and labor markets as well as methodological and conceptual questions in political economy. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, International Studies Quarterly, as well as several edited volumes. The chapter in this volume was written while he was a guest scholar at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame.
Robert R. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He has written widely on authoritarianism and democratic transitions in Latin America, economic reform, and social welfare policies. His most recent book is Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe, 2008), co-authored with Stephan Haggard. He is also co-author (with Stephan Haggard) of The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions, winner of the 1995 Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics, awarded by the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He is also co-editor (with Joan M. Nelson) of Crucial Needs, Weak Incentives: Social Sector Reform, Globalization and Democratization in Latin America, 2004.
Peter Kingstone (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Crafting Coalitions for Reform: Business Preferences, Political Institutions and Neoliberal Reform in Brazil (Penn State Press, 1999) and The Political Economy of Latin America: Reflections on Neoliberalism and Development (Routledge, 2010), as well as co-editor (with Tim Power) of Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions and Processes (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) and Democratic Brazil Revisited (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). He has published various articles and book chapters on the subject of democratization and the politics of neoliberal economic reforms.
Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research interests include political parties, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective, co-author of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness; Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America; and The Resurgence of the Left in Latin America. He is currently working on projects on the durability of revolutionary regimes, relationship between populism and competitive authoritarianism, and party collapse and democracy in Peru.
José Antonio Lucero is Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where he is also Chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Lucero’s main research and teaching interests include Indigenous politics, social movements, Latin American politics, and development. His current research examine the cultural politics of conflicts between Indigenous peoples and the agents of extractive industry in Peru, including mining companies, oil companies, and the German filmmaker Werner Herzog.
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. She co-directed the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/1, Attacking Poverty and was the president of LACEA (Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association). She is currently the director of the Commitment to Equity Project and editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality’s Forum. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research focuses on assessing the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in Latin America.
James W. McGuire is Professor and Chair in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. McGuire specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on Latin America and East Asia and a topical focus on democracy, social policies, and public health. He is the author of Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina (Stanford, 1997) and of Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge, 2010), which won the 2011 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
Darryl McLeod is an Associate Professor of Economics at Fordham University specializing in economic development. His research focuses on poverty, inequality, employment and immigration issues. McLeod recently co-directed a survey of Mexican immigrants in New York and Mexico funded by the Packard Foundation, UCLA NAID and Fordham University. In 2006–2008 he worked as a consultant to UNDP’s Poverty Group and helped write chapter 4 of UNDP BCPR’s 2008 report Post-conflict economic recovery. He has also worked as a consultant to the World Bank, the IADB, Lehman Brothers Latin America Group, and the OAS. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
James Mahoney is a Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Sociology at Northwestern University. His books include Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (2010); Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (co-edited with Kathleen Thelen; 2010); Comparative-Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (coedited with Dietrich Rueschemeyer; 2003); and The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (2001). He is a past president of the Section on Qualitative and Multimethod Research of the American Political Science Association and a past chair of the Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology of the American Sociological Association.
Luigi Manzetti is Associate Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. He specializes in issues that include governance, corruption, and market reforms in Latin America. His most recent book is entitled Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective (Penn State Press 2010). His journal articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Latin American Research Review.
David R. Mares (Ph.D. Harvard 1982) holds the Institute of the Americas Chair for Inter-American Affairs at the University of California, San Diego where he is also Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He is also the Baker Institute Scholar for Latin American Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and an elected member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London). Mares was previously Professor at El Colegio de México (1980–82), Fulbright Professor at the Universidad de Chile (1990), and Visiting Professor at FLACSO Ecuador (1995).
Gerardo L. Munck, Argentinian by birth, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and is Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). His research focuses on democracy, methodology, and Latin America. His books include Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics (Johns Hopkins University, 2009); Regimes and Democracy in Latin America (Oxford, 2007); Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (with Richard Snyder; Johns Hopkins, 2007); and Authoritarianism and Democratization. Soldiers and Workers in Argentina, 1976–83 (Penn State Press, 1998).
Philip Oxhorn is a Professor of Political Science and Editor-in-Chief of the Latin American Research Review. He has published extensively on the comparative study of civil society and democracy. This includes Sustaining Civil Society: Economic Change, Democracy and the Social Construction of Citizenship in Latin America (Penn State Press, 2011), as well as Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile (Penn State Press, 1995). Professor Oxhorn has lectured extensively in North and South America, Western Europe, Asia and Australia. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.
Anthony W. Pereira is a Professor of Brazilian Studies and Director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. He obtained his B.A. from Sussex University (U.K.) in 1982 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He has held positions at the New School, Tufts, Tulane, and the University of East Anglia. His research interests include the issues of democracy, human rights, and military rule, particularly in Brazil and the southern cone of Latin America. His latest book Ditadura e Repressão was published in Brazil by Paz e Terra in 2010. He is currently engaged in research on police and public security reform in Brazil.
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the core faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on political stability, institutional performance, and the rule of law in new democracies. He has served as chair of the Political Institutions Section of the Latin American Studies Association, and is the author of Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
David Pion-Berlin is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. He is a Latin Americanist widely known for his research and writings on civil-military relations, defense, security, political repression and human rights, and is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects. Recent articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, Armed Forces & Society, The Latin American Research Review, and Latin American Politics and Society. He has consulted for the Organization of American States and the U.S. Navy. His recent scholarship is on the phenomenon of military disobedience in the face of presidential orders to suppress civilian uprisings.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His main research interests lie at the intersection between political economy and comparative political behavior, with a particular interest in Eastern Europe and Latin America. He has worked on the politics of IMF programs in Eastern Europe and Latin America, the rise of unorthodox parties in East Europe, and on the role of historical legacies in post-communist regime change. His publications include From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2009) and articles in The Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and International Studies Quarterly.
Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor of Politics and (by courtesy) Economics at New York University. Previously he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991, he is the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Award, the 1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Award, the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Award, and the 2010 Johan Skytte Prize. He recently published Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010).
Kenneth M. Roberts is Professor of Government and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. He specializes in the study of Latin American politics and the political economy of inequality. He is the author of Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford University Press) and co-editor of The Diffusion of Social Movements (Cambridge University Press) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Johns Hopkins University Press). His research on party systems, populism, and political representation in Latin America has been published in a number of scholarly journals. He is currently writing a book on party system transformation in Latin America’s neoliberal era.
Carlos Rufin is Associate Professor of International Business at Suffolk University in Boston, with a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on access by the urban poor to utility services in developing countries, regulatory reform and governance, political economy, and energy sector development. He has also taught at Babson College, the Harvard Kennedy School, Instituto de Empresa Business School, and PUC-Rio. As an independent consultant, he has worked for Rio Light, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, AES Corporation, Gas Natural, and other private and public organizations.
Ben Ross Schneider is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of MIT-Brazil and MIT-Chile programs. His books include Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries, and Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America. He also has written on topics such as economic reform, democratization, the developmental state, industrial policy, and comparative bureaucracy. Schneider’s current research focuses on the institutional foundations of capitalist development in Latin America with special attention to business groups, MNCs, labor markets, and skills.
Cassilde Schwartz is a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also earned her B.Phil. in History, Politics and Philosophy and her M.A. in Political Science. Schwartz’s fields of specialization include Comparative Politics and Political Behavior, and her current research focuses on the consequences of protest activity in Latin America.
Mitchell A. Seligson is the Centennial Professor of Political Science and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). He has published over 140 articles, 14 books, and more than 35 monographs and occasional papers. His most recent books are The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Democracy and Political Support in Eight Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2009, co-authored with John Booth), and Development and Underdevelopment, the Political Economy of Global Inequality (Fourth Edition, Lynne Reinner Publishers, co-edited with John Passé-Smith). He is an elected member of the General Assembly of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and a member of the editorial boards of Comparative Political Studies and the European Political Science Review.
Eduardo Silva is the Lydian Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. He has published extensively on environmental issues, especially the political ecology of development policies supportive of community forestry, in journals—including Development and Change, Latin American Politics and Society, The Journal of Latin American Studies, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Global Environmental Politics—as well as in edited volumes. His most recent book is Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His current research focuses on popular sector interest intermediation in new left governments in South America.
Peter H. Smith is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a specialist on comparative politics, Latin American politics, and U.S.-Latin American relations. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Smith received the Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1966. His recent publications include Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World (3rd edition, 2008), Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective (2nd edition, 2012), and the coauthored Modern Latin America (7th edition, 2010).
Deborah J. Yashar is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, former director of Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies, co-editor of the Cambridge University series on Contentious Politics, and a member of the editorial committee of World Politics. Her books include Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala (Stanford University Press, 1997) and Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge University Press, 2005)—which received the 2006 Best Book Prize, awarded by the New England Council on Latin American Studies and the 2006 Mattei Dogan Honorable Mention, awarded by the Society for Comparative Research. She is currently writing a book about violence in Latin America.
Elizabeth J. Zechmeister is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2003. Her research focuses on comparative political behavior, in particular in Latin America. Her work includes studies of voting, ideology, representation, charisma, and crisis. She has published articles in the Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Behavior, among others. She is coauthor of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2010).