Sara Niedzwiecki

This profile was current as of 2021, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Sara Niedzwiecki is an assistant professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she specializes in comparative social policy, subnational politics, and mixed-methods research. Her research agenda focuses on the politics of social policy and on multilevel governance in Latin America.

While at Kellogg, Niedzwiecki will work on a project entitled “Immigrants’ Access to Social Protection in Latin America,” which examines the extent to which states, markets, and families protect immigrants from sickness, poverty, and old age and provides the first systematic analysis of immigrants’ access to social services and transfers in the region.

Niedzwiecki’s work has been published in a number of journals. She is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-author of Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016).

She is the co-director of PolSoc, a network of academics who work on Latin American social policy, the founder and co-organizer of the Southwest Workshop on Mixed Methods Research, and the 2019-2020 division chair of the American Political Science Association's Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section.

Niedzwiecki received her PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.