Maria Victoria Murillo APSA Nominee Biography

Maria Victoria Murillo is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University. She received her BA at the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD at Harvard University, and she started her career as a faculty member in the Political Science Department at Yale University. She has been a Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and a Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

She has studied how political coalitions shape labor politics, economic policymaking, and public utility reform in the new democracies of Latin America. Her more recent collaborative research project on distributive politics through clientelistic and patronage networks in new democracies has been funded by the National Science Foundation. An initial output of this research project published as “Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market” received the Luebbert Award for the Best Published Article by the Comparative Politics Section of APSA.  She is also the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2001) and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: the Politics of Institutional Weakness (Pennsylvania State University Press 2005). She has published articles on World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, Desarrollo Economico, Politica y Gobierno, as well as other journals and edited volumes. Her manuscript Voice and Light: Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities will be published by Cambridge University Press.

She is in the editorial board of numerous Latin American journals and has served in the committees for the Luebbert Award for the Best Book, the Luebbert Award for the Best Published Article, and the Sage Award for the Best Paper of the Comparative Politics Section of APSA.