Democracy in Hard Places
Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud
Author Information
Scott Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching focus on democratization, party systems, and Latin American politics. His book with Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall, won the Best Book Prizes of the Democracy and Autocracy section of the American Political Science Association and the Political Institutions section of the Latin American Studies Association. Mainwaring was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. In April 2019, PS: Political Science and Politics listed him as one of the fifty most cited political scientists in the world. He served as the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies and as faculty co-chair of the Brazil Studies program at Harvard University from 2016 to 2019.
Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the co-Editor of the National Endowment for Democracy's Journal of Democracy. At the Harvard Kennedy School, he directs the Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt; The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds; as well as several articles and book chapters. He is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a trustee of the American University in Cairo, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros foundation, among others.
Contributors:
Nancy Bermeo (PhD Yale University) is currently a Nuffield Senior Fellow at Oxford University and a PIIRS Senior Scholar at Princeton University. She writes on the causes and consequences of political mobilization and regime change as well as the quality of democracy. Her books include an award-winning study of the breakdown on democracy titled, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, and Parties, Movements and Democracy in the Developing World (with Deborah Yashar), Mass Politics in Hard Times (with Larry Bartels), and Coping with Crisis: Government Reactions to the Great Recession (with Jonas Pontusson). Her latest book, titled Democracy After War, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Rachel Beatty Riedl (PhD Princeton University) is the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her research interests include institutional development in new democracies, local governance and decentralization policy, authoritarian regime legacies, and religion and politics, with a regional focus in Africa. Previously, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Riedl is co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa, featuring weekly episodes of news highlights and interviews about life and politics on the African continent.
Emilia Simison (MA Torcuato Di Tella University) is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her recent work focuses on authoritarian regimes and how their institutions shape the extent to which citizens and interest groups influence policy making. For her dissertation, she is currently exploring the mechanisms through which changes in regime type affect policy to better understand how, and under which conditions, policy change takes place. Prior to MIT, she was a PhD fellow at the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) working at Gino Germani Research Institute, and taught at the University of Buenos Aires and Torcuato Di Tella University.
Dan Slater (PhD Emory University) is Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies and Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan. He specializes in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He previously served as Director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and associate member in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. He is the author of Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia and co-author of Coercive Distribution.
Ashutosh Varshney (PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard, Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Battles Half Won: India's Improbable Democracy, Collective Violence in Indonesia, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, India in the Era of Economic Reforms, and Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India.
Lucan Ahmad Way (PhD University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Way's research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the developing world. His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability in the Modern World (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation for the extraordinary durability of autocracies born of violent social revolution. Professor Way's solo authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics, examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union. His book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way's work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.
