Javier Pérez Sandoval
AFHEA, BA UIA, MPhil DPhil Oxon
Research Topic:
I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the DPIR and a Research Fellow at Keble College. I am happy to be back in Oxford after spending the 2025–2026 academic year at the University of Notre Dame.
My work sits at the intersection of (sub)national regime change studies, historical political economy, and institutional design. My BA project uses mixed methods and leverages evidence from Latin America to comparatively explore how and why taxes, social policies, and market regulations vary inside countries. If you’re keen, you can read more about it here.
During the Autumn of 2023, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Previously, I was a Departmental Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and I concluded my DPhil in Politics as a member of the DPIR and Wolfson College.
My doctoral dissertation won the APSA William Anderson Award, and my research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Democratization—where I received the Frank Cass Award for the best article by a young scholar—Alternatives, Agenda Política, and Perfiles Latinoamericanos. I have also authored opinion pieces for The Washington Post, the Presidential Power Blog, and the Oxford Politics Blog.
I enjoy working out, swimming, and long walks. I’m also a Starcraft 2 fan, and a sci-fi, coffee, and cinema aficionado.
You can find out more about me and my research on my personal website.
Teaching
Intro. to the Theory and Practice of Politics
Intro. to Quantitative Methods
Comparative Government
Political Sociology
Politics in Latin America
Publications
- 2026. How Illiberalism Damages Democracy. Journal of Democracy, (with M. Jiménez and T. Power).
- 2026. Why Populists Hollow Out Their States. Journal of Democracy, (with Andrés Mejía Acosta).
- 2025. Crossing Borders, Expanding Evidence, and Strengthening Theory: Synergies between Subnational and Mixed-Method Research, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.
- 2024. Multilevel Regime Decoupling: The Territorial Dimension of Autocratization and Contemporary Regime Change, Perspectives on Politics.
- 2023. Measuring and assessing subnational electoral democracy: a new dataset for the Americas and India, Democratization.
- 2023. The Persistence of Latin American Violent Democracies, Alternatives, (with Daniel Barker Flores).
- 2022. El origen, trayecto, y rumbo de la investigación en torno a la variación de los regímenes subnacionales, Agenda Política.
- 2021. Inside Countries: reduciendo la escala de análisis en el análisis político, Perfiles Latinomaericanos, 29(58).