Instrumental Incoherence in Institutional Reform- Speakers

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Special Issue for World Development Instrumental Incoherence in Institutional Reform

Author Bios [* denotes speaker]

Michael Albertus is professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. His most recent book, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap (Cambridge, 2021) examines why governments that implement land reform programs only rarely grant property rights to beneficiaries and how that impacts development and inclusion. Albertus' work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Development Economics, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and elsewhere.

• Rachel Brulé is Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy in the Pardee School of Global Studies and Graduate Faculty in Political Science at Boston University.

Simon Chauchard is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Social Sciences Department, University Carlos 3 Madrid, Investigador Distinguido at the Instituto Carlos 3 Juan March (IC3JM), and Director of the Polarization, Identity and Misinformation Lab (PIMlab) at IC3JM.

• Kent Eaton is Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of Territory and Ideology in Latin America: Policy Conflicts between National and Subnational Governments (Oxford University Press, 2017). His research examines the interplay between politics and territory, focusing on the territorial (re)organization of states around the world today. He is also the co-author of The Political Economy of Decentralization Reforms (World Bank, 2010) and The Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook (U.S. Agency for International Development, 2021).

• Jean-Paul Faguet is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at the LSE. He is Co-Chair of the LSE-Stanford-Uniandes Conference on Long-Run Development, and Chair of the Decentralization Task Force at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue. He works at the frontier between economics and political science, using Q2 methods to investigate development transformations. He has published in the development, political science, and economics literatures, including Decentralized Governance: Crafting Effective Democracies Around the World (LSE, 2023), Is Decentralization Good for Development? Perspectives from Academics and Policymakers (Oxford, 2015), and Decentralization and Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia (Michigan), which won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book of 2012.

Francisco Garfias is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. He studies the political economy of development, with a focus on how states build capacity, establish institutions, and navigate civil conflict in developing countries. His work is published in leading political science journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. His research has received several recognitions, including APSA’s Michael Wallerstein Award. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in Economics from Stanford University.

Rebecca Hanson is Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, with appointments in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies. She has conducted research on participatory democratic neighborhood experiments, socialist ideology in Venezuela, civilian police reform, police militarization and its impacts on organized crime, and the effects of police-community meetings on citizen attitudes and police behavior. Dr. Hanson’s other area of research analyzes sexual harassment and ethnographic fieldwork. Her research has been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Crime, Law, and Social Change, and Sociological Forum, among others.

Alyssa Heinze is a Political Science PhD Student at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Dorothy Kronick is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. She studies Latin American politics, focusing on Venezuelan politics, crime and policing, and competitive authoritarianism. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, International Organization, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, among others. Her commentary on Venezuelan politics has been published in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Dorothy holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining Berkeley, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science in the School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University. He is a comparative politics scholar who has written works on civil war, ethnic identity, culture, and nationalism.

Victor Menaldo is Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and is affiliated with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS), Near and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for Environmental Politics. He co-founded and co-leads the UW Political Economy Forum. He specializes in comparative politics and political economy and is interested in the political economy of property rights, industrialization, innovation, liberal democracy, and development. He has two books are The Institutions Curse (Cambridge, 2016) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (with Mike Albertus), also Cambridge (2018).

Victoria Paniagua is Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics. Her research lies at the intersection of international and comparative historical political economy and centres on development, redistribution, and state-building in Latin America. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, which was awarded APSA's Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy. Prior to joining the LSE, she received her PhD in Political Science from Duke University and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

• Rajesh Ramachandran is Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Monash University, Malaysia. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His principal areas of research lie at the intersection of development economics and its political economy. His primary research interests include political linguistics, economics of discrimination, economics of education, institutional economics, and social identity.

• Joan Ricart-Huguet is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Program on Ethics, Politics, & Economics at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. His interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. They include political elites, colonial investments and legacies, and decentralization, with a regional focus on Africa and more recently on Latin America. His work has been published at the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and World Politics, among others.

• Jorge Rojas-Vallejos is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB) in Santiago, Chile, Chief Economist at the Foundation for Equitable Growth (Fundación Economía y Equidad), and Economic Adviser at the Chilean Congress. He specializes in macroeconomic theory and development economics and is interested in applications of game theory to partisan politics. He has published articles in the Journal of Development Economics, Energy Policy, Open Economies Review, and the International Journal of Game Theory.

• Emily A. Sellars is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Her research interests are at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and economic history. Her work has been published in leading journals in political science and economics. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy and Broadstreet. Her work has received several honors and awards, including APSA’s Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy in the previous two years. Sellars received her Ph.D. in Political Science and Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.