Faculty Affiliates of the Chicago Center on Democracy

The Chicago Center on Democracy’s Faculty Affiliates Network is a group of faculty members, mostly at the University of Chicago, who share research interests in topics related to democracy. They meet regularly to discuss and refine ideas on relevant topics.

Michael Albertus

Associate Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Michael Albertus’s main research focus is on the political conditions under which governments implement egalitarian reforms. His first book, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, examines why and when land reform programs are implemented. Other research interests include political regime transitions and stability, politics under dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict.

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Clifford Ando

David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor, Department of Classics
University of Chicago

Clifford Ando’s research focuses on the history of religion, law and government. His current projects include a study of public law in the Roman republic, a volume on the emergence of theories of religion in the high Roman empire, and on-going inquiry into weak state formation.

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Maria Bautista

Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago

Maria Angélica Bautista’s research focuses on the political, economic and social consequences of state-led repression. Her PhD dissertation studied the military dictatorship in Chile, and she also studies the heterogeneous effects and the intergenerational consequences of repression.

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Elisabeth Clemens

William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and the College
University of Chicago

Elisabeth Clemens’ research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. She is a former Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, and has served terms as chair of both the political sociology and comparative historical sociology sections of the American Sociological Association, as a member of the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Third Sector, and as President of the Social Science History Association for 2012-13.

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Chiara Cordelli

Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Chiara Cordelli’s main areas of research are political philosophy and applied ethics, with a particular focus on theories of justice, egalitarianism, normative defenses of the state, the public/private distinction in liberal theory, and the ethics of philanthropy and assistance.

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Marco Garrido

Assistant Professor, Sociology
University of Chicago

Marco Garrido’s work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. The project has been to connect this relationship with urban structure on the one hand and political dissensus on the other. In the process, he highlights the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics.

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Tom Ginsburg

Leo Spitz Professor of International Law; Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar; Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago

Tom Ginsburg focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. His latest book, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, was written with Aziz Z. Huq. He co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789.

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Andreas Glaeser

Professor, Sociology
University of Chicago

Andreas Glaeser is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus.

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Aziz Huq

Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law
University of Chicago

Aziz Huq’s teaching and research interests include constitutional law, criminal procedure, federal courts, and legislation. His scholarship concerns the interaction of constitutional design with individual rights and liberties.

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Demetra Kasimis

Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Demetra Kasimis’ research and teaching focus on democratic theory with emphasis on the thought and politics of classical Greece and its contemporary receptions. She is particularly interested in questions of membership, exclusion, and immigration.

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Matthew Landauer

Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Matthew Landauer’s research focuses on political institutions and practices and the historical, conceptual, and normative questions they raise. Much of his research is on ancient Greece, which offers theorists models of politics that are at once seemingly familiar and strikingly different from our own, from institutions of accountability to practices of public speaking and rhetoric to methods of voting and forming collective judgments.

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Zhaotian Luo

Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Zhaotian Luo is a formal theorist with a broad substantive interest in political institutions and political economy of non-democracies. He specializes in developing and applying game theoretic models to explain interactions among political actors as well as the foundations and performance of political institutions. His current research centers on the role of information in politics.

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Luis Martinez

Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago

Luis Martinez’s main research interest is in the empirical analysis of the political economy of development, with a particular focus on the functioning of democracy in Latin America. In current work he studies the impact of fines for electoral abstention on voter behavior in Peru and whether the source of government revenue affects local governance in Colombia.

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John McCormick

Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

John McCormick’s research and teaching interests include political thought in Renaissance Florence (specifically, Guicciardini and Machiavelli), 19th and 20th century continental political and social theory (with a focus on Weimar Germany and Central European emigres to the US), the philosophy and sociology of law, the normative dimensions of European integration, and contemporary democratic theory.

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Monika Nalepa

Associate Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

With a focus on post-communist Europe, Monika Nalepa’s research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her next book manuscript, Parties Ascendant, examines the development of programmatic parties in new democracies with a special focus on legislative institutions.

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Shmulik Nili

Assistant Professor, Political Science
Northwestern University

Shmulik Nili’s current work focuses on three related themes: 1) How we should think about the collective agency of “the sovereign people,” both as a matter of abstract philosophy and as a matter of concrete public policy, 2) What political philosophy can contribute when facing obvious moral failures in public policy, and 3) The moral value of integrity, whether applied to ordinary people, to authoritarian demagogues, or to collective institutions.

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James Sparrow

Associate Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College
University of Chicago

James Sparrow is an historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation. His specialties include modern US political history, political economy, war and society, human rights, America in the world, and the history of social science.

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Susan Stokes

Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

Susan Stokes is the Faculty Chair of the Chicago Center on Democracy, where she guides the strategy and direction of the center. Her research interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies; distributive politics; and comparative political behavior. She teaches courses on political development, political parties and democracy, comparative political behavior, and distributive politics.

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James Wilson

Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Chicago

James Lindley Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests span political philosophy, ethics, and law. Most of his work focuses on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and questions of what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions.

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