Mariela Szwarcberg
Mariela Szwarcberg (PhD, University of Chicago) will spend the 2009–10 academic year pursuing her research on the consolidation of political machines in new democracies. In her project “Making Local Democracy: Political Machines, Clientelism, and Social Networks in Latin America,” she explores why some parties are clientelist while others are not, and why some clientelist parties succeed while others fail. More specifically, she studies parties’ engagement with political machines and the strategies brokers employ to secure votes. Her findings show how relationships between clients and brokers and between brokers and political bosses affect the quality of democracy.
Szwarcberg’s work is based on interviews, archival research, and data collection in Argentina, where she collected and coded thousands of party ballots for elections from 1995–2005. At Kellogg, she plans to increase the project’s comparative scope by adding Mexico and Peru to her analysis. She will teach an undergraduate political science course in the spring.
