Former Phd Fellow and Dissertation Year Fellow Laura Gamboa (Phd '16) has garnered an honorable mention for the Leubbert Book Award for her book Resisting Backsliding: Opposition Strategies against the Erosion of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
The Luebbert Book Award is given by the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association ffor the best book in the field of comparative politics published in the previous two years.
Resisting Backsliding looks at how, in the past two decades, democratically elected executives across the world have used their popularity to push for legislation that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and undermines political rights and civil liberties. Gamboa Gutierrez explores why, in these situations, some countries become competitive authoritarian regimes while others resist democratic backsliding, comparing as case studies Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia.
Gamboa is an assistant professor at the University of Utah whose research focuses on institutions, regimes, and regime change in Latin America.