Miriam A. Golden

Between 2019 and 2024, I held the Peter Mair Chair of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. Prior to my 2019 move to the EUI, I taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. From fall 2024, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. 

I was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  My research is in the area of political economy. I have conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa.  My work has been honored with the Jewell-Loewenberg Prize, the Lawrence Longley Award, the Gregory A. Leubbert Book Award (runner-up), a Choice Award, and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. Most recently, I am a recepient of the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Data Set Award for the Global Legislator Database. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), UK's Department for International Development (DfID), and the International Growth Center (ICG). 

I am currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national study of why reelection rates of national legislators rise with economic development. The book manuscript in preparation is provisionally entitled Capacity Gap: Electoral Failure in Weak States. A first publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared as The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World in 2023 in Cambridge University Press' Elements in Political Economy series.  My book prior to that was Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017), written with economist Raymond Fisman. 

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At the EUI, I taught two graduate seminars annually. The core course in comparative politics (team-taught with Simon Hix) introduces students to topics in the subfield. The Practicum in Reproducible Research Methods walks students through all the steps involved in a complex collaborative reproducible research project and provides instruction in the skills required to successfully execute modern social scientific research. 

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I am an Associate Member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I have 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. I am 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). I am an invited researcher to J-PAL's Governance Initiative. Long a proponent of research transparency and replicability, I am a BITSS Catalyst with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences and have assembled multiple data sets that are available in the public domain on Dataverse.​

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A recent interview with me is available at Scientia Futura.