VioDemos Principal Researcher. Professor at the School of Government UC and full professor at McGill University in Canada where he holds the Diamond-Brown Chair in Democracy Studies. Researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamento de los Datos and the Centro de Ecología Aplicada y Sustentabilidad. He is researcher in charge of the Fondecyt Regular project “Unequal Democracies in Weak(er) States. Assesing Latin America’s Development Trap” (2023-2026) and in 2023 he received the grant The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to develop the research ‘Organized Crime, State Crises, and the Consolidation of Violent Democracies’. 

Phd in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His main research interests are organized crime, political representation, party systems, state capacity, and the development of methodologies that combine computational social science with classical qualitative analysis (thick data).

His books include “Democracia Muerta” (Planeta, 2024), “Criminal Politics and Botched Development in Latin America” (with Andreas Feldmann, Cambridge Elements in the Politics of Development, 2023), “Latin American Politics and Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis” (with Gerardo Munck, Cambridge University Press, 2022), “Diminished Parties” (co-ed., Cambridge University Press, 2021), “En vez del optimismo. Crisis of Political Representation in Current Chile” (Catalonia, CIPER 2017) and ”Segmented Representation. Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies”(Oxford University Press, 2014).