Program archives

Kenneth M. Roberts teaches comparative and Latin American politics, with an emphasis on the political economy of development and the politics of inequality. His research is devoted to the study of political parties, populism, and labor and social movements. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992, then taught at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty at Cornell. He is the author of Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford University Press, 1998), along with a forthcoming manuscript from Cambridge University Press on the transformation of party systems in Latin America's neoliberal era. His research on the social bases of political representation in Latin America has been published in a number of scholarly journals, including American Political Science Review, World Politics, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Politics and Society, and Latin American Politics and Society.

Dr. Roberts has conducted research in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina, with funding support from Fulbright, MacArthur, Mellon, and National Science Foundation grants. He is also a co-team leader of the Institute for the Social Sciences 2006-09 theme project on "Contentious Knowledge: Science, Social Science, and Social Movements," and he is coordinating a working group of U.S. and Latin American scholars studying the "new Left" in Latin America.