Department of Political Science
European University Institute
email: golden@ucla.edu
tel: (310) 206-8166 (direct)
tel: (310) 825-4331 (department)
fax: (310) 825-0778
Office location: 3262 Bunche Hall
Miriam Golden is Professor of Political Science. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University. Professor Golden's research is in the area of political economy. She has conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa. With economist Raymond Fisman, Professor Golden has recently authored Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her current field project concerns political responsiveness in Pakistan. She is also engaged in a cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection.
At the undergraduate level, Professor Golden teaches data analysis for students of comparative politics. She annually offers PS167D, "Political Institutions and Economic Development," as well as an upper division course on political corruption. Both courses use "flipped" instructional methods, with data analysis in the computer lab replacing lectures. At the graduate level, Professor Golden teaches a seminar on distributive politics as well as a seminar on political corruption and election fraud. In addition, she regularly participates in the three-person faculty group that team-teaches the two-quarter introductory seminar to comparative politics.
Professor Golden is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. She has been a Visiting Senior Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Golden is an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) of the University of California at Berkeley, a Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and an active member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). At UCLA, she is affiliated with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and with Global Public Affairs @UCLA Luskin. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Centre, the Governments of Quebec and Canada, J-PAL, and the U.K.'s Department for International Development. Long a proponent of research transparency and replicability, Professor Golden has assembled multiple data sets that are available in the public domain on Dataverse.
For the 2018-19 academic year, Professor Golden is on sabbatical and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In September, she will assume the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.