Panel: Brazil Election

David Samuels is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1998. His research and teaching interests include Brazilian and Latin American politics, US-Latin American relations, and democratization.

Professor Samuels currently serves as co-editor of Comparative Political Studies. His most recent book is Partisans, Antipartisans and Non-Partisans: Voting Behavior in Brazil (with Cesar Zucco) (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His book Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach (with Ben Ansell) (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation award for "best book on politics, government, or international affairs," as well as the William H. Riker best book prize from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association. He is also the author of Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers (with Matthew Shugart) (Cambridge University Press, 2010) (winner of the Hallet Award Hallett for best book published at least 10 years ago that has made a lasting contribution from the APSA Section on Representation and Electoral Systems in 2023), Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and the co-editor of Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). His introductory undergraduate comparative politics textbook, Comparative Politics and country-casebook Case Studies in Comparative Politics, are available from Pearson Higher Education.

Professor Samuels has published articles in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the British Journal of Political Science, among others. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation (in 1996 and 1999) and the McKnight Foundation (in 2001), and was awarded Fulbright Fellowships in 2004 and 2013.

Fernando Bizzarro '23, is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. This academic year (2026-27), he also serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale's Jackson School of International Affairs. He studies the nature, causes, and consequences of democratic institutions and political parties in Latin America. He is currently writing a book, with Scott Mainwaring, on the causes of democratic stagnation in contemporary Latin America.

Fernando Limongi is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Sao Paulo and at Sao Paulo Economic School at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of Democracy and Development (co-author with Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez and Jose Antonio Cheibub) and Executivo e Legislativo na Ordem Constitucional (co-authored with Argelina Figueiredo). Recently, he published a book reconstructing the political crisis that led to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Operação Impeachment, Todavia Editora, 2023). Professor Limongi is engaged in a series of projects and research groups dealing with democratic rule around the world.

Nara Pavão is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) in Recife, Brazil. Her research sits at the intersection of political behavior, public opinion, and comparative politics, with a focus on how individuals process political information, form opinions, and make decisions. She is particularly interested in electoral accountability, misinformation, and corruption. Her primary regional focus is Latin America, especially Brazil. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and Latin American Politics and Society. She is also co-author of a book published by Cambridge University Press (2023) on the causes and consequences of anti-corruption judicial crusades in Latin America. She is a member of the EGAP network and has strong interests in experimental research design and survey methods. She holds a PhD in Political Science (Comparative Politics) from the University of Notre Dame (2015) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI) at Vanderbilt University (2015–2016).

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).