Jessie Trudeau

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. I am a faculty affiliate of of the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab at Stanford University, and the Center for Policy Research, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, and Law, Society, and Policy Program at Syracuse University.

My work spans comparative politics and political economy, with a substantive focus on crime, policing, inequality, and governance, and a primary focus on Latin America. My book project, “Machine Gun Politics: Why Politicians Cooperate with Criminal Groups,” explains why politicians strike electoral bargains with criminal organizations, how criminal groups deliver votes, and how these types of electoral deals affect the welfare of voters living in criminally-governed areas.

My work is supported by Innovations for Poverty Action, UNU-WIDER, the Latin American Development Bank (CAF) and the Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative, among others, and has been published by or accepted in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, and Economia. In 2022, my paper (conditionally accepted at the AJPS) won the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Best Conference Paper Award at APSA and the Public Choice Society’s Elinor and Vincent Ostrom Prize, and I received the 2023 Best Dissertation in the Study of Urban Politics Award from the APSA Urban Politics Section and was the runner-up for the 2023 Juan Linz Price for the Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy from the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Section.

I received my Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2022 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from 2022 to 2023.