María Victoria Murillo

Residency: Columbia Global Center Santiago

Research: The Political Economy of Land Conservation in Latin America

María Victoria Murillo is professor of political science and international affairs and director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. She received her BA at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and her MA and PhD at Harvard University. Previously, she has been faculty at Yale University and has been a visiting professor at Universidad Di Tella and Paris I, a Fullbright fellow, and a Harvard Academy, a Peggy Rockefeller and a Russell Sage Scholar. She is currently a co-director of the Political Economy of Climate Lab at the Center of Political Economy, and she is also on the faculty boards of the Institute for Global Policy and the Center on Political Economy at Columbia University.

She has published widely in the U.S. and Latin America. Her most recent books include Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voter, Poorer Voter and the Diversification of Parties Electoral Strategies with Ernesto Calvo (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky (Cambridge University Press 2019), which was published in Spanish by Siglo XXI as La Ley y la Trampa (2021). The three of them have edited The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her prior books include Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, Comparative Politics Series, 2001).