PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Full Professor of Political Science at the School of International Service in American University (USA) and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Democracy and Populism at Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico). Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and a professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina.
She has also worked as a consultant for organizations such as the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Currently, her research focuses on the analysis of subnational and national democracies, semi-authoritarian regimes, unequal access to public goods, institutional accountability, and the impact of China on subnational jurisdictions in Latin America.
She is the author of Democrats and Autocrats (Oxford University Press, 2015), Inside Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and her articles have been published in The Journal of Politics, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Journal of Democracy (in Spanish), Perspectives on Politics, Regional and Federal Studies, among others.