Kristin McKie

This profile was current as of 2016, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Kristin McKie is assistant professor of African studies and government at St. Lawrence University. A Kellogg visiting fellow for the 2015–-16 academic year, she studies variations in the development of the rule of law and party competition across sub-Saharan Africa. 

At Kellogg, McKie will work on the book manuscript “Reining in the Big Men: African Executives and the Rule of Law.” She is investigating the conditions under which the rule of law—and especially constitutional limits on executive power—becomes institutionalized in newly liberalized countries where presidential authority has historically gone unchecked.

Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Uganda and Zambia, her project links the level of party competition in a country to the variation in the adoption of, and later adherence to, executive term–limit laws. The work encompasses sub-Saharan Africa and considers in comparative perspective other developing regions, notably Latin America and Central Asia.

Previously, McKie was a 2011-12 postdoctoral associate with the Yale Program on Democracy at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.