Prof. Beatriz Magaloni is the 2024 BMI Prize Laureate
The prize is awarded to Prof. Magaloni for her contribution to the field of the study of authoritarianism and its return as a global challenge
November 3rd, 2024
The 2024 BMI Prize Laureate is Prof. Beatriz Magaloni, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University.
The prize is awarded to Prof. Magaloni for her contribution to the field of the study of authoritarianism and its return as a global challenge. In her research, she explains why autocratic regimes hold multi-party elections. Her work provides a broad comparative framework and is now considered a “classic” in the field. Assigned in most undergraduate and graduate-level seminars on comparative politics, the themes and theories developed in her work set the agenda for conceptualizing multi-party autocracies, which have become the most common form of dictatorship worldwide. Her body of work also provides an understanding of the most insidious threats to democracy in the contemporary period, which do not come from military coups but from civilian leaders ascending to power through elections.
Prof. Magaloni’s work on autocracies constitutes a key pillar for how subsequent scholars have come to understand and study multi-party autocracies, the role of elections in these systems, what shapes mass support and voting behavior in autocracies, the factors that explain why do autocratic rulers survive or die, when they democratize the electoral institutions and the conditions under which they might cede power to their opponents. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other renowned journals.
For further information about Prof. Beatriz Magaloni:
https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/beatriz-magaloni
https://carnegieendowment.org/experts/2132
The prize will be awarded to Prof. Magaloni at the joint BMI – University of Donja Gorica Conference in Podgorica, Montenegro, on November 25th.
Photo by: Rod Searcey