Javier Corrales

Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor and chair of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Corrales’s research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, democratic backsliding, political economy of development, ruling parties, the incumbent’s advantage, foreign policies, and sexuality. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean and writes periodically for the New York Times, and his latest book, Fixing Democracy: Why Constitutional Change Often Fails to Enhance Democracy in Latin America, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

Corrales serves on the editorial board of Latin American Politics and Society, Political Science Quarterly, the European Review of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Americas Quarterly. He was president of the New England Council of Latin American Studies and Program Co-Chair of the 2010 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association. In 2010 he was appointed by Governor Deval Patrick to serve on the executive board of Mass Humanities, a grant-making organization affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. 

He has taught at the Center for Latin American Research (CEDLA) at the University of Amsterdam and at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. He has also offered short courses at the Institute of Higher Studies in Administration (IESA) in Caracas, the School of Government at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, and at the Universidad de Salamanca. In 2016, he was Fulbright scholar in Bogotá, and in 2005, in Caracas. In 2000, he became one of the youngest scholars ever to be selected as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He has also been a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Center for Global Development, Freedom House, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996.