PANIAGUA, Maria Victoria

Victoria Paniagua is a political scientist specialized in comparative and international political economy. Her work explores the contemporary and historical political economy of development, redistribution, and state building in developing countries. She received her PhD in Political Science from Duke University in 2018. During 2018-2019, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and, starting in the Fall of 2020, she will be an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Her dissertation, and current book project, was the recipient of the 2019 Mancur Olson Award given by the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in political economy completed in the previous two years. In this work, she explores why, how, and to what extent economic elites influence developmental and redistributive policies. Her answer to these questions departs from standard political economy approaches built on the assumption that economic elites’ interests can be traced to a single sector or asset. Instead, she proposes that the structure of elites’ asset portfolios is crucial to explain their policy preferences, how they engage with state actors to advance them and, ultimately, their capacity to influence the policymaking process. She examines this argument in Argentina and Chile, leveraging over a century of data from previously untapped historical archives.