Miriam A. Golden

Miriam A. Golden is a comparative political scientist who works on the machinery of democratic accountability: whether elections discipline politicians, why corruption and clientelism persist, and whether citizens can organize to gain responsive governance. Her research combines original surveys of elected officials, deep familiarity with local environments, and large-scale cross-national data, in settings that range from Italy to India and Pakistan. She is a Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles.

From 2019 to 2024, Golden held the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. She taught at UCLA for many years before the move.

Golden is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. Her books and articles have won multiple awards, including 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.

Golden is completing a book manuscript, Capacity Gaps: Reelection and Governance Around the World, which grew out of the finding that legislator reelection rates rise with economic development. An initial publication from the project, with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared as The Puzzle of Clientelism (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

She is beginning a new project that will partner with elected politicians to ask whether governments can rebuild citizens’ trust without spending more. The strategies it tests are deliberately modest — new ways of communicating with voters, and low-cost improvements to regulations and to public-facing procedures and interfaces — on the premise that citizens’ trust depends as much on the quality of their interactions with government as on the goods and services that government provides.