Julieta Casas

Welcome! 

I am the Einstein-Moos postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University in June 2024.

I study political institutions with a focus on the state bureaucracy. My research concerns comparative and historical perspectives on public administration and administrative reform. Specifically, it evaluates the relationship between state bureaucracies, political parties, and democracy to show how state capacity and democratic governance can, under certain circumstances, strengthen each other. I am also interested in the long-term effects of state capacity on regime stability and the role that gender plays in the professionalization of public administrations. My research brings novelty to the study of political institutions by focusing on a largely unexplored comparison: the U.S. and Latin America in historical and contemporary settings. 


In my book project, Building Bureaucratic Capacity: The Political Origins of Civil Service Reforms, I trace the origins of bureaucratic reform to different types of patronage and identify the conditions under which countries can significantly reduce the politicization of the bureaucracy. This research draws from an in-depth case study of the United States and Argentina in the nineteenth century and from the study of broad patterns in bureaucratic reform across the Americas. 

During my fieldwork, I collected and systematized data on public employment in Argentina in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including civil service reform bills, bureaucratic censuses, government documents, and reports from public employee associations, and finally, a dataset that tracks the hiring and firings of public employees at the federal level for selected years between 1862 and 1930. For the U.S., I relied on similar compilations, completed them, and digitized data on local chapters of civil service reform associations.  

The American Political Science Association Centennial Grants and the Johns Hopkins Suveges Fellowship have supported my research. 

Curriculum vitae

Contact: jcasas2@stanford.edu