Sara
Niedzwiecki

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research is on the process through which social policies are formed and implemented as well as on the territorial structure of government in Latin America. Niedzwiecki’s book, Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press) explores the political factors that shape the implementation of social policies in decentralized countries. A second, co-authored book, Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016), presents the Regional Authority Index for 80 OECD+, Asian, and Latin American countries from 1950 to 2010. During 2020-2021 academic year, Professor Niedzwiecki was a fellow at University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies where she worked on a new project on social policy and immigration in Latin America. This book project studies unequal access to social services and income between immigrants and nationals in Latin America. It describes how legal status and incorporation to the labor market affect immigrants’ access to social policies through an analysis of the main transfers and services in four Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. It combines original qualitative coding of legislation and policy documents and fieldwork. Niedzwiecki’s work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Regional and Federal Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, International Political Science Review, Saúde Coletiva (Brazil), and Revista de Ciencia Política (Chile).