Miriam A. Golden is a Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles. From 2024 through 2026, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, where she remains actively involved in the newly-established Democracy Action Lab.
Between 2019 and 2024, Golden held the Peter Mair Chair of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. Prior to her 2019 move to the EUI, she taught at UCLA.
Golden is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Capacity Gaps: Reelection and Governance Around the World that emerged out of data showing that legislator reelection increases with economic development. An initial publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared as The Puzzle of Clientelism in 2023 (Cambridge University Press).
Golden's work has been honored with the Jewell-Loewenberg Prize, the Lawrence Longley Award, the Gregory M. Luebbert Book Award (runner-up), a Choice Award, and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. Most recently, she is a recipient of the 2025 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Dataset Award for the Global Legislators Database.
Photograph by Pamela Davis Kivelson
Affiliations & Contact
- Research Professor, University of California at Los Angeles
- Email: golden@ucla.edu