Isabela Mares, Professor of Political Science, Yale University,Lauren E. Young, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California Davis

Isabela Mares is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She has written extensively on a range of topics in comparative politics and political economy, including democratization, clientelism and corruption, taxation and fiscal capacity development, social policy reforms in both developed and developing countries. She is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press), for which she won the Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (awarded by the American Political Science Assciation, 2004), she also won the First Best Book in European Studies award (Council for European Studies, 2004) and received an Honorable Mention from the American Political Science Association.
At Yale, Isabela Mares is teaching courses in political economy, welfare state development, democratization and democratic erosion, and an interdisciplinary graduate course on Micro-historical Analysis in Comparative Research.

Lauren E. Young is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in political science with distinction from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford, and the Center for Global Development (CGD) (non-resident). She is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network and a co-organizer of the California Workshop on Empirical Political Science and the 2019 WPSA Autocratic Politics pre-conference.
Her research aims to understand how individuals make decisions when faced with the threat of violence. She has been published in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, the Journal of Peace Research, and Comparative Political Studies.

Winner of the APSA William Riker Award for the best book in Political Economy
Honourable Mention from the Gregory Luebbert Award

"[The book] represents a huge contribution both theoretically and empirically. The latter is not only to be commended because of its methodological inventiveness, but also due to the demanding original data collection strategy focusing on actual individuals—putting the 'social' into social scientific research." -- Máté Mátyás, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow and PhD Candidate, Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary, Europe-Asia Studies

"Mares and Young use both ethnographic and survey evidence to analyze everyday politics in poor rural regions of Hungary and Romania. Local politicians use their discretion in allocating state resources to buy votes; they also exploit political differences within the community by applying welfare programs in a coercive manner, thus attracting support from the working poor. This signaling blurs the distinction between clientilistic and programmatic appeals. Threats seem to be more effective than gifts, and employers or moneylenders are often used as intermediaries. Such tactics are used by parties on both the Right and the Left. A flawed electoral system combines with such factors as corruption and poverty to lead to widespread disillusionment with the efficacy of democracy. Exemplary in its use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of electoral politics around the world." -- P. Rutland, Wesleyan University, CHOICE