Sofia Vera is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. Prior to joining the University of Kansas, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Reed College (2019-2020) and a visiting research scholar at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, GIGA, (2017-2018). She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. Her research interests include political behavior, party competition, representation, and political institutions.
Her dissertation focuses on political accountability for corruption and the institutional and contextual factors that influence voter responses to the political elite's exposed corruption. She uses a mixed-methods approach, combining original experimental and text data, with survey and qualitative data from Colombia and Peru. Her research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Fellowship, the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, the Alfredo and Luz Maria Gutierrez Fellowship, the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and the German Exchange Studies Foundation (DAAD).
Selected publications
"Accepting or Resisting? Citizen Responses to Corruption Across Varying Levels of Competence and Corruption Prevalence." Political Studies. 2020;68(3):653-670.
"Do Corrupt Politicians Mobilize or Demobilize Voters? A Vignette Experiment in Colombia." Latin American Politics and Society (2018) 1-19. With Miguel Carreras.
"Ecuador: Democracia después de nueve años de la Revolución Ciudadana de Rafael Correa." (2016) [Ecuador: Democracy after nine years of Rafael Correa’s Citizen’s Revolution.] Revista de Ciencia Política, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2016: 347-365. With Santiago Llanos-Escobar.
"Voices of Change in Cuba from the Non-State Sector." 2018. University of Pittsburgh Press. With Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Roberto Veiga Gonzalez, Lenier Gonzalez Mederos, and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. Translated in Spanish as: Voces del Cambio en el Sector No Estatal Cubano. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2016.
“Portfolio allocation and cabinet design strategies in Peru.” 2017. In: Martinez-Gallardo, Cecilia and Marcelo Camerlo (eds.) Government Formation and Minister Turnover in Presidential Cabinets. Routledge. With Miguel Carreras.
“Ecuador: Democracia después de nueve años de la Revolución Ciudadana de Rafael Correa.” 2016 [Ecuador: Democracy after nine years of Rafael Correa’s Citizen’s Revolution.] Revista de Ciencia Política, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2016: 347-365. With Santiago Llanos-Escobar.
