Sandra Botero

Former Kellogg Institute PhD Fellow Sandra Botero is associate professor in the Facultad de Estudios Internacionales, Políticos y Urbanos at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research interests are around courts and politics, rights effectiveness, and electoral dynamics, with a focus on Colombia and Latin America.

Botero is the author of Courts that Matter: Activists, Judges and the Politics of Rights Enforcement (Cambridge University Press 2023) and the co-editor of The Limits of Judicialization: From Progress to Backlash in Latin American Politics (Cambridge University Press 2022) with Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos and Daniel M. Brinks. Botero also has authored four chapters in edited volumes, including in the Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights (2023). She has had peer-reviewed papers published in journals such as Revista de Ciencia Política, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Politics in Latin America, and Latin American Law Review.

During her Kellogg fellowship, she will study the politics of efforts to regulate social media in Latin America, to better understand what explains differing levels and modes of regulation across countries, as well as to reflect on their implications for democracy in the region. She will focus on regulation (legislative, judicial, and self-adopted by commercial platforms) in two areas: transparency around electoral information and free speech.

Botero holds a PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.