About

Zachary Elkins is associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on Latin American cases.

Currently completing the book manuscript that examines the design and diffusion of democratic institutions in developing democracies, he is the author of the award-winning The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, 2009), among other works.

Elkins codirects both the Comparative Constitutions Project, an NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and constituteproject.org, a website that provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.