The Kellogg Institute is sad to announce that Marcelo Leiras, a political scientist who was affiliated with the Institute as a PhD student in the 1990s and early 2000s, died unexpectedly yesterday at the age of 57. A student of Kellogg founding director Guillermo O'Donnell, Leiras participated in the conference and edited volume honoring O'Donnell after his death. Below, we share two tributes to Marcelo, written by friends and colleagues Pablo Bulcourf and Luis Schiumerini.
I am writing to tell you about the death of our colleague Marcelo Leiras, professor at the University of San Andrés and independent researcher at CONICET. Most recently, he directed the Master in Administration and Public Policy at Universidad de San Andres (UDeSA), serving between 2014 and 2020 as Director of its Department of Social Sciences.
Professor Leiras had shown an early interest in knowledge, reflected in his high school studies at the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, belonging to the University of Buenos Aires, where he later pursued an undergraduate degree in sociology. Between 1992 and 1994, he was a fellow of the Young Researchers Training Program of the Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES). He obtained his PhD at the University of Notre Dame, where he worked with Guillermo O'Donnell, who was his thesis director. Years later he was part of the Program on Democracy at the Macmillan Center for International Studies at Yale University.
In 2007 he published Todos los caballos del rey: los partidos políticos y el gobierno democrático de la Argentina (All the King's Horses: Political Parties and Democratic Governance in Argentina) by Prometeo Publishing House, a relevant work that includes several aspects of both his thesis and his subsequent research. Together with Daniel Brinks and Scott Mainwaring they edited, in 2014, Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O'Donnell under the imprint of Johns Hopkins University Press.
During his professional career, Marcelo Leiras worked as advisor and consultant in several national and international organizations such as CIPPEC, the United Nations Development Program, the ILO, UNICEP and the Ford Foundation. In recent years he was an advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, maintaining a strong political commitment, which he used to express assiduously in social networks.
Marcelo Leiras was part of the political scientists who were trained in the incipient Argentine democracy, continuing the legacy of academics such as Guillermo O'Donnell, Oscar Oszlak, and Marcelo Cavarozzi.
Pablo Bulcourf
Marcelo Leiras (Notre Dame Political Science PhD ’07 and former Kellogg doctoral student) passed away on August 8 at age 57 in his native Buenos Aires. Marcelo was an influential political scientist, a brilliant and committed intellectual, a devoted mentor, and a loving father to Albertina and Manuel. Marcelo was, above all, a wonderful person, known for his generosity and warmth.
At Notre Dame Marcelo worked closely with his friend Guillermo O’Donnell and with his advisors Michael Coppedge and Scott Mainwaring. “He was an excellent student, smart and hard-working,” recalls Scott Mainwaring fondly, “and a pleasure to know and work with.” Marcelo came into his doctoral studies with a deep normative commitment to the study of democracy and a sharp theoretical mind. He seamlessly blended insights from the history of political thought with comparative politics and political economy to produce scholarship on party organizations, federalism, party system nationalization, judicial politics, constitutionalism, democratic stability and, more recently, political polarization. His book, Todos los Caballos del Rey (All the King’s Men) represents an original and path-breaking contribution to theories of party system nationalization (Only Marcelo could come up with such a wonderful title.) Marcelo was also coeditor (with Dan Brinks and Scott Mainwaring) of an edited volume that honored Guillermo O'Donnell: Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O'Donnell.
Marcelo leaves his mark as a professor, mentor, and institution builder. He played a fundamental role in creating a world class Political Science Department at the University of San Andres. Marcelo mentored several generations of undergraduates who went on to pursue doctoral studies and occupy faculty positions in top-tier political science departments, in Argentina and abroad. These students emphasize the positive impact that Marcelo’s unparalleled combination of classroom eloquence and unconditional support had on their careers.
Academia was not enough for Marcelo. He was too committed to improving Argentine democracy, too interested in politics to merely observe it from a distance. With his beautiful and eloquent prose, he wrote hundreds of essays that shaped public debates on how to improve the quality of Argentine democratic institutions and how to reduce regional inequalities in economic development. Most recently, he intervened in public policy arena, through his collaboration with think tanks and as an important advisor to the Argentine Ministry of Interior.
It was the privilege of a lucky lifetime to be friends with Marcelo. I got to know him when I was a Ph.D. student at Yale and he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Program on Democracy. I have the fondest memories of that period. I learned massively from sharing courses and seminars, and from his encouraging feedback on my research and incipient dissertation project. But most of all, I enjoyed his friendship. I will never forget the day when he helped my dad push a mattress to my apartment, or when we celebrated Argentina’s dramatic classification to the 2010 World Cup. During the last fifteen years, we collaborated on projects, talked about politics, grabbed drinks, and shared our experiences as parents. His last two WhatsApp messages (from July 15 and July 26) were about Argentina’s Copa América Victory and Kamala Harris rally in Wisconsin.
It is hard to imagine a world without Marce Leiras. Our thoughts are with Albertina and Manucho, his beloved children.
Luis Schiumerini