Anustubh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ashoka University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at UC Berkeley. His research examines the politics of local governance and the determinants of state capacity. He also focuses on how new technologies are adopted and scaled in resource-poor contexts. Anustubh holds a Master’s degree in Global Policy Studies and Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a Bachelor’s in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering from Pune University, India.
Natália joined the Center on the Politics of Development in January 2014. She is an assistant professor at Emory University. Her research interests are comparative politics, public policy, elections, and inequality. Her work has been published at Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, Latin American Research Review. Her dissertation was the 2019 recipient of the Harold D. Lasswell Award for best dissertation in the field of public policy and the 2018 James G. March award by Yale’s Political Science department. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science and a M.A. in International Development Economics from Yale University. She holds a M.A. in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP) and a B.A. in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).
Anna is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. She is also a research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her work focuses on the politics of authoritarianism and how divisions among powerful authoritarian stakeholders can shape the prospects of democratization as well as the stability of new democracies. In her book project, she documents a novel source of these divisions arising from elites’ investments in distinct forms of labor control under authoritarianism. She explores these dynamics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Argentina and Chile. Research from this project was awarded the 2024 Sage Best Paper Award from APSA‘s Comparative Politics section. All of her work draws on natural experiments, archival research, as well as qualitative and quantitative data.
She received her PhD in Political Science from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. She completed a Master‘s in Political Science from FLACSO, Ecuador. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Michigan.
Christopher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow at the Governance and Local Development Institute. His primary research agenda examines the historical evolution of Indigenous-state relations in Latin America—from independence to the present. In his book (The Long Shadow of Extraction: The Origins of Indigenous Autonomy Demands), which is under contract at Princeton University Press, he examines how experiences with historical land and labor loss shaped Indigenous groups’ demands for autonomy. The research for this project won the 2020 APSA Best Fieldwork Award and the 2021 Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy. His research has also been awarded the Leon Weaver best paper award by APSA’s Representation and Electoral Systems section and an honorable mention for the Sage Best Paper Prize by APSA’s Comparative Politics Section. All of his work employs a multi-method approach, using experimental and natural experimental data as well as extensive interviewing and archival research.
http://www.christopherleecarter.com
Anirvan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Aung San Suu Kyi Endowed Chair in Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville’s department of political science and the Center for Asian Democracy. He studies the political economy of development with a regional focus on South Asia, and a substantive emphasis on religion, gender, party politics, and democratization. His research examines the underlying causes of the ascendance of majoritarian and populist movements, and their implications for the political inclusion of marginalized groups, particularly women and ethnic minorities. Parallel research agendas investigate the dissemination and sustenance of political ideologies, as well as the links between electoral institutions and democratic health. His research has been published in Science Advances, and by Cambridge University Press.
Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, where he is a Research Associate at the Center for the Politics of Development.
https://anirvanchowdhury.github.io
Justine is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the political science department at the University of Michigan. Prior to this position, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She studies comparative politics and political behavior, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, she is interested in the challenges of democratization efforts in post-conflict settings and weakly institutionalized democracies. Her book project examines the role of civil society organizations in fostering democracy after civil war. Her research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation; the National Science Foundation; the West Africa Research Association; the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley; and the Center for African Studies, the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, and the Institute for International Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work has been featured on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and published or forthcoming in African Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Political Behavior, and PS: Political Science & Politics.
Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., she completed a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in Côte d’Ivoire. She holds a dual-language Master’s degree in International Affairs, Conflict Resolution and Civil Society Development from the American University of Paris and the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Originally from North Carolina, She graduated from Elon University with a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies, African concentration.
Germán is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Economics at Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He also directs the Master’s Program in Public Policy and Administration. His research examines the role of political institutions in shaping inequality, economic informality, and corruption. He specializes in leveraging quantitative methods, with an emphasis on causal inference, to address these issues. He holds a PhD from Yale University and has held academic appointments as a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and visiting scholar positions at NYU-Buenos Aires, Princeton University, and Tulane University.
Natalia is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit at Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her main research interests are in comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on corruption, public goods provision, and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizen and ex-combatant attitudes and their role in stabilizing peace in post-conflict settings. In her dissertation, she examined the informational and institutional environments that paved the way for the rise and success of outsider candidates.
She holds an M.A. in Economics from the University of Los Andes (Colombia). Prior to her Ph.D., she worked at the World Bank, the Democracy Observatory, and the Colombian National Planning Department.
https://www.nataliagarbirasdiaz.com/
Nikhar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and the South Asia Institute at Columbia University. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Prior to his academic positions, he was a Senior Analyst and Research Associate at Cornerstone Research, where he conducted economics and finance research in complex regulatory disputes.
He received his Ph.D. with Departmental and University Distinction, M.Phil., and M.A. in Political Science from Yale University. His B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and Political Science (Honors) is from Williams College, where he was a Williams College Undergraduate Research Fellow and studied at the University of Oxford as part of the Williams-Exeter Program at Oxford.
Nick is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His research concerns topics that span comparative politics, political economy, and public policy. He is especially interested in understanding how governance institutions structure political attitudes. He has a regional interest in Southeast Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for International Studies, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Singapore Ministry of Education (AcRF), the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG), and the Weiss Family Fund. He is also a non-resident research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development.
He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. Before starting graduate school, he worked in Jakarta at Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting, a political consultancy specializing in public opinion surveys. Prior to that, he received a Fulbright grant to Indonesia.
Adan S. Martinez completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on comparative politics, political economy, and political behavior in Latin America. His research interests include the provision of public goods, class and ethnic cleavages, and political behavior addressing public good disparities. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., Adan spent time working at his alma mater as a fundraiser and a legislative assistant in the Minnesota state legislature. He received his B.A in Political Science and Latin American Studies from Macalester College.
Vanessa completed her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on comparative politics and international relations. She spent the first two years of her Ph.D. researching the prevalence of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by peacekeepers during UN peacekeeping operations. Her dissertation looks at the heterogeneity of the Mapuche in Chile, their political behavior, and how they engage with the Chilean government. Prior to attending U.C. Berkeley, she graduated from Cornell University magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Government. She has previously worked on a variety of research projects in both International Relations and American politics. She most recently worked for Aila Matanock’s Invited Interventions project collecting information on security-related interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to graduate school, she worked as Sabrina Karim’s research assistant for the Elsie Initiative on Women in Peace Operations and collaborated on the MOWIP Methodology. Her work has been supported by the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies, the UC Berkeley Mentored Research Award, the U.C Berkeley Graduate School Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Samuel R. Berger National Leadership Scholarship from Cornell University, and the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute.
Lucas is an Associate Professor at Insper Institute of Education and Research, São Paulo, Brazil, where he investigates political representation in the developing world. He is also an associate with the Governance and Local Development Institute at the University of Gothenburg. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, among other outlets. Before joining Insper, he received a Ph.D. In Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Also, he is a non-resident research associate of the Center on the Politics of Development, Berkeley, and a former Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
Mathias is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He studies and teaches comparative politics, political behavior, political economy, and research methods. His research focuses on identity politics and political participation and draws on field, survey, and natural experiments, and qualitative fieldwork in Latin America and Europe. His previous work has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Analysis, World Development, Political Science Research and Methods, and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. His llatest book Creating Partisans: The Organizational Roots of New Parties in Latin America (2024, Cambridge University Press) examines why some political parties in new democracies are successful in creating mass partisanship and engendering stable electoral support, while most fail to take root in society and disappear quickly.
Before joining the LSE, he held positions at Texas A&M University and the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network, and he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a Research Associate with the Center on the Politics of Development (CPD) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bhumi joined the Center on the Politics of Development in August 2016. She is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown’s McCourt School. She focuses on gender politics, the political economy of governance, and political behavior in India. Prior to Georgetown, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Berkeley, she worked as a J-PAL Policy Consultant for the Ministry of Rural Development in India to create policy implementation plans for finance management reforms and rural poverty reduction. She has additional experience with managing experiments and research with One Acre Fund in Kenya and running social enterprises in India and Sierra Leone. She holds a Master’s degree in Area Studies with distinction from the University of Oxford, with a concentration on Modern South Asia. Prior to that, she graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and a certificate in Documentary Film Making.
Pia is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, working at the intersection of political economy of development and comparative politics. She is interested in political accountability, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa, and more recently in Germany. Her research focuses on political oversight of bureaucrats and implications for public service provision on the one hand, and electoral behaviour on the other. It has won the Best Fieldwork Award, Best Dissertation Award in Experimental Research, and Best Experimental Paper Award from the American Political Science Association. She uses experimental, quasi-experimental and qualitative methods to measure causal effects and disentangle the underlying mechanisms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Science Advances, and the Journal of Development Economics. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and has spent a year as a fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.
Catlan is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of elite political behavior, violence, and the political economy of development, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her dissertation and first book project, The Ties that Bind or Break: Local Leaders, Dispute Arbitration, and Violence in Nigeria, examines the influence of local leaders on mitigating or exacerbating violence through examining their key roles as arbiters of local disputes. She has conducted fieldwork in India, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria and has consulted on projects with USAID, DAI, and Mercy Corps.
Prior to graduate school, Catlan worked for Innovations for Poverty Action in Uganda and Kenya managing studies on micro-savings, health and governance, and technology diffusion. She also was a Research Manager at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Catlan holds an M.A. in Political Science from Leiden University and a B.A. in Political Science from Wake Forest University.
Steven is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Boston University. He studies comparative politics with a focus on democracy, political violence, and electoral accountability. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the APCG-Lynne Rienner Best Dissertation in African Politics in 2017 by the African Politics Conference Group, a section of the American Political Science Association and African Studies Association. His book Voter Backlash and Elite Misperception: The Logic of Violence in Electoral Competition (CUP 2023) analyzes why politicians use violence as an electoral tactic and how it affects voting behavior. He has also written on ethnic politics, electoral accountability, survey research methods, and political polarization. Current projects include work on conceptualizing election-related violence, and on ethnic politics, polarization, and democratization in Africa. He previously worked on global health policy research at the Center for Global Development and in the microfinance sector in Tanzania, and he has served as a consultant for the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and MSI.
Oren Samet completed his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2025. He will join Rice University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science in 2026, following a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His research centers on the international dimensions of authoritarian politics and democratization, with a particular emphasis on opposition politics and a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His book project examines the success and strategies of opposition parties, focusing on the international activities of these actors in authoritarian contexts. Other work focuses on opposition competition in authoritarian elections, processes of autocratization, and contemporary challenges of international democracy promotion and governance aid. His academic work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Communication, and his other writing has been published in outlets including Foreign Policy, Slate, and World Politics Review. Before entering academia, Oren was based in Bangkok, Thailand, where he served as the Research and Advocacy Director of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, working with politicians and civil society leaders across Southeast Asia. He also previously worked as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Luis is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is a board member of the Argentine Panel Election Study and a research associate of the Center for the Politics of Development at UC Berkeley. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is a scholar of comparative politics, political behavior, and political economy, with a regional expertise in Latin America. His research examines how citizens develop political preferences and strategies in developing democracies. In his work, he tries to bridge the common micro-macro divide in social science by examining how political and economic environments condition individual preferences and actions. Empirically, he combines cutting-edge techniques of causal inference, such as natural and survey experiments, with deep understanding of context through extensive fieldwork.
He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.
Carlos is an Assistant Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in Political Science. He is also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford Impact Labs (Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab) and affiliated with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Broadly, his research interests encompass the political economy of development of Latin America and of sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he studies questions concerning crime, human capital, immigration, and policing in developing countries. Carlos is from San Salvador, El Salvador.
https://cschmidtpadilla.
Paul is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include governance in weakly-institutionalized states and civil conflict, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. His dissertation, based on extensive field research in Chad, investigates variation in the ability of non-state institutions to produce political order in weak states. His research has received support from the United States Institute of Peace; the National Science Foundation; the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego; and the Institute of International Studies and Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in journalism and economics from Northwestern University.
