Beatriz Magaloni

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013) and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development. My first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. My second book Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez) studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent form of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses. In 2010 I founded the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) within FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There I pursue a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods and criminal violence. Most of the work at POVGOV is conducted in a team lab-based approach with undergraduate and graduate student trainees and post-doctoral fellows, and is jointly published. The projects use a multi-method approach combining observational data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), surveys, experimental designs, and in-depth ethnographic work. My work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals. Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, I was a Visiting Professor at UCLA and was a Professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. I also hold a law degree from ITAM.