Julieta Casas

Welcome! 

I am the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in June 2024.

I study comparative political development, focusing on state capacity, civil society, and political parties. My research agenda focuses on the historical development of the state bureaucracy and addresses fundamental questions on administrative reform and civil society, examining both historical and contemporary contexts in the U.S. and Latin America. 

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 relies on a mixed methods design that draws from an in-depth case study of the United States, Argentina, and Chile in the nineteenth century and the study of broad patterns in bureaucratic reform across the Americas. You can see more about my book project here.

In addition, my other areas of research include gender in the bureaucracy and historical political economy. Most of my projects involve retrieving and digitizing original archival materials that would otherwise be lost in the archives to produce new data sources. You can see more about my research here.

The American Political Science Association Centennial Grants, the Johns Hopkins Suveges Fellowship, the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University, and the Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University have supported my research. 

Curriculum vitae

Contact: jcasas2@stanford.edu