Timothy Power

Kellogg Institute Advisory Board member Timothy J. Power is head of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Oxford, responsible for 15 departments including three professional schools. He has been affiliated with Kellogg as a graduate student (PhD 1993, political science), a visiting fellow (fall 2005), and a working paper author (1988, 1999).

Power is a comparative political scientist with a deep commitment to interdisciplinary area studies. His research concerns democratization and political institutions (parties, legislatures, and elections) in modern Latin America, especially Brazil. With Cesar Zucco (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), he co-directs the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, which have recorded the opinions of Brazilian politicians in every parliament elected since 1990.

Most recently, Power has been working on the cross-regional implications of some of Latin America’s experimentation with democratic institutions, particularly the question of how presidents cope with increasingly fragmented parliaments. His latest, co-authored book, Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems (Oxford University Press, 2018) compares new democracies in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. 

Power also has been involved in the governance of several professional organizations, including the Brazilian Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association, the latter for which he served on the executive council for ten years.