Emilia Simison

Emilia Simison is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Latin American Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of policymaking and policy change. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze how political institutions across regime types shape the extent to which citizens and interest groups influence policymaking and policy outputs. She is the co-author of Lawmaking under Authoritarianism: Factions, Institutions, and Outcomes Across Dictatorships (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and Cómo gobernó la dictadura: Facciones, instituciones y políticas en el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976–1983) (Edhasa, 2026), and the author of Policy in Transition: How Regime Change Affects Policymaking (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

As the inaugural Ivorra–IAP Visiting Scholar at DRCLAS, Emilia Simison will be working on her collaborative project Democracy, Participation, and Public Goods in Latin America. Focusing on the experience of upgrading and integration of informal settlements in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the project studies the mechanisms driving democratic responsiveness, the relationship between policy responsiveness and support for democracy, and whether and how unmet expectations of quality-of-life improvements contribute to democratic erosion.

She holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an MA from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT), and a BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), all in Political Science. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University and a PhD fellow at CONICET at the Gino Germani Research Institute. She co-organizes the Authoritarian Political Systems Group.