Susan Stokes

PhD, Stanford University, 1988. John S. Saden Professor of Political Science and director of the Yale Program on Democracy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Her research interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies, with a focus on Latin America. Her most recent book is Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism: Political Trust in Argentina and Mexico (with Matthew Cleary, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), received prizes from the APSA Comparative Democratization section and from the Society for Comparative Research. Other recent publications include “Perverse Accountability,” American Political Science Review, and “Endogenous Democratization,” with Carles Boix, World Politics. She teaches courses on Latin American politics and development, political parties and democracy, and clientelism, patronage, and vote buying.

Campus address: 8 Prospect Place, Room 107
Phone: (203) 432-6098
Email: susan.stokes@yale.edu
C.V.

Listed here are various papers, articles and book chapters available for download.

Endogenous Democratization - In a paper published in World Politics, Carles Boix and I show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy.

Informal Rules - In this chapter of Informal Institutions and Democracy, edited by Gretchen Helmke and Steve Levitsky, I suggest that voters' decision rules are informal institutions, and that some decision rules make democracy work well, others make it work badly.

Is Vote Buying Undemocratic? - In this chapter, written for the book Vote Buying: Who, What, When and How?, edited by Frederic C. Schaffer, I sketch one empirical model of vote buying, and then explain why, if this is a good model, vote buying is indeed undemocratic.

Reditos y peligros electorales del gasto publico en Argentina ( Electoral Payoffs and Dangers of Public Expenditures in Argentina) - Valeria Brusco, Marcelo Nazareno and I document partisan discrimination in the distribution of public funds in Argentina. We also show that, when some parties engage in patronage spending, they depress their vote share in subsequent elections. We develop some general propositions about the conditions under which spending helps, and when it hurts, parties that engage in it.

Machine Politics - In this article, I analyze the strategic interaction between the political machines and voters as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with one-sided uncertainty.

Monopoly and Monitoring - Luis Fernando Medina and I study the effect of political monopoly -- control over a valued resource that can be distributed or withheld from voters, contingent on their vote choice -- on economic development, political competition, and redistributive fiscal policies.