Raúl Madrid

This profile was current as of 2019, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Raúl L. Madrid is a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Latin American politics. His research interests include democratization, political parties, ethnic politics, and social policy. 

While at Kellogg, he will study the partisan origins of democracy in Latin America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a focus on South America. His project argues that elite opposition parties promoted reforms to serve their own political interests and were the central actors in the region’s struggle for democracy. 

Madrid is the author of The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and, with former Visiting Fellow Kurt Weyland, co-editor of When Democracy Trumps Populism: European and Latin American Lessons for the United States (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019). His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, the Latin American Research Review, Political Research Quarterly, Political Studies, and World Politics. He currently is working on a book on the origins of democracy in Latin America.

He received a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University. Before entering academia, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica and as a research analyst with the Investor Responsibility Research Center in Washington, DC.