Maggie Shum

Maggie Shum, a former Kellogg doctoral affiliate, is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Penn State Erie. She received her PhD in political science at Notre Dame, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus in Latin America, Brazil, and Hong Kong. Her research focuses on participatory policies, policy diffusion, political party organizations, transnational contentious politics, social movements, and elections.

This profile was current as of 2018, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community:

Maggie Shum is a Ph.D student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus in Latin America and Brazil. She is specifically interested in participatory policies, policy diffusion, political parties, and different forms of political participation.

Her current research focuses on the incentives that drive politicians to implement and abandon participatory policies, in particular, the case of participatory budgeting (PB) in Brazil. She examines the relations between the diffusion of PB and the presence of a strong party organization. In addition, her research will investigate the mechanisms behind the decline of PB in Brazil despite being praised as the "best practice" by the World Bank.

Prior to coming to Notre Dame, she earned her B.A. in Political Science and Communication at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2008. She then worked as a research intern at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) from 2008 to 2009. She continued her academic career at New York University (NYU) and obtained her M.A in Politics in 2011. Moreover, she interned at Freedom House and worked on several reports, including Freedom in the World (Hong Kong, China and Tibet), Freedom in the Net (China), and the China Media Bulletin.