Mexico’s Democracy at Risk: Judicial and Electoral Institutions under Pressure

Luis Carlos Ugalde is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Director General of Integralia Consulting Group, a political risk and public affairs firm based in Mexico City that he founded in 2009. He previously served as president of Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute, the country’s national electoral authority, from 2003 to 2007.

Ugalde was an RFK Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard in 2008 and has taught at Georgetown, American University, and other leading universities in Mexico. He is widely recognized for his work on democracy, elections, populism, and U.S.–Mexico relations. In addition to his career in consulting and academia, he has extensive government experience. In the late 1990s, he served as chief of staff to the Mexican ambassador to the United States, and in the mid-1990s he held the same position in Mexico’s Ministry of Energy.

He holds a degree in economics from ITAM, as well as a master’s degree in public administration and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.  He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.   He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.    He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022).   He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world. 

Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).

Alisha C. Holland studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of infrastructure investment in Latin America. Prior to joining the faculty, she was an assistant professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.