Julieta Casas

Welcome! 

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab. I am also the Program Advisor at Stanford's CDDRL Reform for Results initiative and an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. Previously, I held the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute (CDDRL). I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in June 2024.

I study comparative politics and public administration, with a regional focus on the United States and Latin America. My research agenda investigates state development, governance, patronage, and corruption in both contemporary and historical contexts. In my book project, Paths Out of Patronage: The Political Origins of Civil Service Reforms (workshopped on May 30, 2025), I trace the origins of bureaucratic reform to different types of patronage and identify the personnel management practices that can reduce the politicization of the bureaucracy in the long run. Methodologically, I adopt a mixed-methods approach, combining administrative data with in-depth case studies of the U.S. and Argentina. You can see more about my book project here.

In other ongoing projects, I investigate the contemporary re-patrimonialization of the bureaucracy in contexts of democratic backsliding, the timing and quality of civil service reform across the globe, and the role of businesses in administrative reform.  I am also interested in retrieving and digitizing original archival materials to produce new datasets. 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