Peru’s 2026 Elections

Rodrigo Barrenechea is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Universidad del Pacífico. He is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a former Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, both at Harvard University. His research focuses on populism, political parties, and democracy in Latin America.

Mabel Cáceres is a journalist with more than twenty-five years of experience working in rural regions of Peru. Born in Puno, her work centers on the rights of communities outside Lima, with particular attention to Andean populations. She is the founder and director of a regional media outlet that has received multiple national and Latin American awards.

Paula Muñoz is a Full Professor at Universidad del Pacífico in Peru. She received her PhD and MA in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Buying Audiences: Clientelism and Electoral Campaigns When Parties Are Weak (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and coauthor of Prosecutors, Voters, and the Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America: The Case of Lava Jato (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her research interests include distributive politics, corruption, subnational politics, democratic accountability, and, more recently, the politics of plastics regulation.

Alberto Vergara is a political scientist and professor at the department of social and political sciences at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Perú). His most recent books are Repúblicas defraudadas: puede América latina escapar de su atasco? (Crítica 2023) ; Democracia asaltada: El colapso de la política peruana (y una advertencia para América Latina) (coedited with Rodrigo Barrenechea) (Universidad del pacífico 2024), and Perú Global: explicar el Perú con el mundo (coedited with Adrián Lerner) (Universidad del Pacífico y Crítica 2025).

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.