About

A former Kellogg Institute visiting fellow (2010-11), Tasha Fairfield is associate professor of development studies in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her comparative politics research analyzes the political economy of inequality, the politics of policy formulation, and business-state relations in Latin America. Her methodological research examines the Bayesian logic of inference in qualitative social science.

Fairfield's book book Private Wealth and Public Revenue in Latin America: Business Power and Tax Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) won the Latin American Studies Association's Donna Lee Van Cott Award in 2016, and her political analysis article on Bayesian process tracing won the American Political Science Association’s Sage Paper Award for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research the following year.

Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the International Centre for Tax and Development. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Latin American studies and an MS in physics from Stanford University.