Maria Victoria Murillo (PhD Harvard 1997) is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2001), co-editor of Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (Pennsylvania State University Press 2005), and author of Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Professor Murillo's research on distributive politics in Latin America has covered labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, and economic policy more generally. Her work on political parties analyzes both their coalitional and policy implications and their linkages with voters in new democracies--emphasizing the difference between programmatic and clientelistic strategies. Her empirical work is based on a variety of methods ranging from quantitative analysis of datasets built for all Latin American countries to qualitative field work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela and survey and experiments in Argentina and Chile. Her work has appeared in World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, the Annual Review of Political Science, and many Latin American academic journals.

Research interests: comparative politics, public policy, labor politics, Latin American politics.