Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell

This profile was current as of 2014, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of politics at Argentina's Universidad Nacional de San Martín, where she previously directed the Center for the Study of Civil Society and Public Life (CESC). A former Kellogg guest scholar and Mellon project coordinator who earned her MA at Notre Dame, she is spending calendar year 2013 at the Institute continuing research on the interconnections between civil society and the quality of democratic institutions in Latin America.

Ippolito-O'Donnell's new book project, Civil Society and the Quality of Democracy in Argentina, seeks to explain why an expansive and highly diversified civil society coexists with fragile democratic institutions, uncertain economic development, and stubborn social inequity.

Examining civil society organizations (CSOs) and their relationship to democratization and state effectiveness, she relates the heterogeneity of Argentine CSOs to the quality of political institutions and builds on previous research to apply a framework linking CSOs political opportunities, organizational resources, and discursive practices.

The author of The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) among other publications, Ippolito-O'Donnell has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme.