Matthew Singer

This profile was current as of 2015, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Matthew Singer (PhD, Duke University), associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, joins the Kellogg Institute for the spring 2015 semester. With a regional focus on Latin America, his research interests include public opinion and voting behavior with an emphasis on how voters seek to hold politicians accountable for their actions.

At Kellogg, Singer will address how citizen attitudes towards political contestation and checks and balances evolve in his project “Delegating Away Democracy: How Good Representation and Policy Successes Can Undermine Democratic Attitudes.”

The project leverages survey data from 18 Latin American countries to explore and explain citizens’ willingness to tolerate the suppression of electoral competition and free speech rights as well as the consolidation of power in the executive at the expense of other branches of government. He is specifically interested in whether citizens who feel represented in government and that the system is performing well—and thus express high levels of support for democratic institutions and satisfaction with the democratic status quo—are also those who are particularly willing to delegate additional authority to political leaders. 

Singer’s research has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and Electoral Studies, among other journals.