Julie Anne Weaver

I am the Research Director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, an initiative to foster better use of academic research on democratic decline.  I am also a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University. I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and earned my PhD from Harvard’s Government Department. 

 

I study comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on local-level political accountability in the Global South, particularly in Latin America. My most recent work studies gender and accountability. I leverage causal inference strategies like regression discontinuity designs and survey experiments, make use of administrative, census and electoral returns data, field original surveys, conduct text analysis, and carry out qualitative interviews.

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My book manuscript, currently under review, examines how voters hold their elected officials accountable in contexts where institutions are weak. I was awarded the Edward M. Chase Prize for my dissertation from Harvard's Government Department. A single-authored article based on my dissertation has been published at the Journal of Politics. 

 

My work has been funded by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative.  The Inter-American Foundation (IAF) Grassroots Development Fellowship funded 12 months of fieldwork in Peru.

 

Prior to Harvard, I worked in the field of international development, beginning my career in Sub-Saharan Africa, with long-term work in Rwanda and shorter-term positions bringing me to Mali and Zambia.  My more recent work focused on Latin America, where I spent four years in Lima, Peru working on politics and governance research.  

 

I hold a B.A. in Sociology from Barnard College and an M.A. in International Development and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).