Meet the Speaker: Kurt Weyland

Kurt Weyland is Professor of Government and Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford (1991) and has conducted extensive field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela. His writings have examined transitions to democracy, market-oriented adjustment, cross-national waves of policy reform and political regime change, the spread of authoritarianism and fascism, and the politics of populism. While he devoted many years to the study of Latin America, he has extended his research interests to Europe as well, moving from the revolutionary wave of 1848 to the contemporary period. His work has drawn considerable inspiration from cognitive-psychological insights and has increasingly combined political science with historical analysis.

Besides many journal articles and book chapters, he has published Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (Pittsburgh, 1996); The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies (Princeton, 2002); Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion (Princeton, 2007); Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, 2014); and Revolution and Reaction (Cambridge, 2019); Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years (Cambridge, 2021); and Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat (Cambridge, 2024).