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Julie Anne Weaver

Research Director, Democratic Erosion Consortium; Lecturer on Government, Harvard University
Chapter Member: Boston SSN
Areas of Expertise:

About Julie

Dr. Weaver studies comparative politics, with a focus on democracy and accountability, particularly in the Global South. Her newest work studies gender and accountability. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and earned her PhD from Harvard’s Government Department.

Contributions

Grant Terminated: Democracy Research

  • Jessica Gottlieb

Publications

"Rewarding Performance in Disaster Response: Evidence From Local Governments in Latin America" (with Felipe Livert and Paola Bordón). World Development 188 (2025).

Combines local-level electoral returns in Chile and Peru with detailed data on how mayors perform in responding to a variety of natural catastrophes, finding that voters do in fact reward local politicians that effectively manage disasters, providing a blueprint for how to best incentivize disaster responsiveness going forward.

"Electoral Dis-Connection: The Limits of Reelection in Contexts of Weak Accountability" Journal of Politics 83, no. 4 (2021).

Describes a new type of breakdown in electoral accountability, whereby voters come to doubt the continuation of good performance in a second term, leading them to prefer churning out incumbents in favor of challengers, unless complementary horizontal accountability mechanisms are strong.