LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS

Undergraduate Program

The Department of Political Science has four specialists in Latin American politics who regularly teach classes at the undergraduate level. Barry Ames teaches Latin American Political Development (PS 1322 and the PS 1302 writing seminar). Aníbal Pérez-Liñán teaches Latin American Politics (PS 1321), the Political Development seminar (PS 1302), and Comparative Politics (PS 0300). Scott Morgenstern teaches both Comparative Politics (PS 0300) and a survey course on Latin American Politics (PS 1321). Our courses combine detailed knowledge of Latin America (and our own passion for the countries and the people in the region) with the study of theories and methods in political science.

We encourage our students to discover Latin America, to learn about its politics, to do independent research, and eventually to take a step forward and pursue a Certificate in Latin American Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS).

Latin American Politics Graduate Program

The University of Pittsburgh offers, in our view, one among the best political science departments in the country for PhD students interested in Latin American politics.

Four major reasons to study political science at Pitt

First is the training we offer to our graduate students, based on the premise that scholars must combine advanced research techniques with a detailed knowledge of Latin American countries. Political Science for Latin Americanists at the University of Pittsburgh focuses on rigorous, systematic training. We seek to combine profound understanding of Latin America's history, economic development, and culture with intensive instruction in modern political science methods. In addition to field and research seminars in various aspects of Latin American politics, all of our students take at least two semesters in quantitative methods, and we strongly urge our Latin Americanists to take courses in social choice and game theory. We also make it possible for Latin Americanists to attend summer programs in advanced quantitative techniques or survey research at University of Michigan. The purpose of this training is not to make every student a quantitative researcher—indeed, we support a wide variety of research methodologies-but we believe that every student should at least be a well-trained consumer and/or critic of quantitative techniques and formal theory as applied to Latin America.

A second reason is the quality of our faculty and their research agenda. Our department is in a unique position to develop cutting-edge research on elections, political culture, political institutions, and public opinion in several Latin American countries. The Department of Political Science at Pitt includes three full-time Latin Americanists. Barry Ames is our distinguished Mellon Chair. He works on Brazil, focusing on legislative and electoral politics, and on Latin America as a whole, focusing on public policy and on institutions. Associate Professor Scott Morgenstern is the newest addition, joining the faculty in 2005. His work focuses on political institutions, parties, and legislative politics throughout Latin America, and he has recently published a book on roll call voting in Latin American and US legislatures. Anibal Perez-Linan recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and has joined us as an Assistant Professor. A native of Argentina, he has already published widely in journals in the United States and Latin America. His work focuses on political institutions and he is currently working on a book dealing with the impeachment process in Latin America. We all work in the field of democratization. Each year we teach a full range of graduate seminars and upper division courses on the region.

We pride ourselves on working closely with our students. Because the ratio of faculty to students is ideal, we can spend the time that it takes to help students through their programs. As a result, nearly all of our students have been awarded fellowships for their dissertation year, including grants from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Wilson Center. Upon graduation, our students have been rewarded with fine jobs, both inside and outside of academia. In recent years, we have placed our Latin Americanists in tenure stream positions at the University of California at Riverside, Florida State University, Colby College, the University of West Virginia, the University of Delaware, and the Central Michigan University. Other students have chosen to move into the applied world and have landed permanent research positions at the World Bank and the State Department Office of Research, as well as private sector consulting groups.

A third reason to study Latin American politics at Pittsburgh is the availability of resources and the multidisciplinary environment provided by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). The University of Pittsburgh is a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center in Latin American Studies, the only university in the entire northeast of the U.S. to have continuously received that status in the 1970s to the present. Our students usually affiliate with CLAS to take a Certificate in Latin American Studies along with their Ph.D. in Political Science. The certificate allows students to take courses outside of our department from well-known scholars in anthropology, education, history, public policy, sociology, and other related fields.

What this means to you as a student is that there are extensive resources on which to draw. Each year CLAS provides support for summer field research to many of our graduate students. Last summer, for example, three of our graduate students undertook research in six different Latin American countries. In addition, we offer conference travel support for students on a par with support for faculty. We also offer FLASF fellowships, the Heinz Latin American Social Policy Fellowships, Mellon Fellowships and assistantships. We currently have over 200 students in our Latin American Studies Certificate program, with a large number of students from Latin America.

Other important resources complement the support provided by CLAS. The headquarters of the Latin American Studies Association have been based at Pitt since 1986. The Eduardo Lozano Latin American collection, located at the Hillman Library, was established in 1967 and it is currently of the strongest in the world, with over 350,000 volumes. A full-time staff supervises this collection, and it is accessible over any of hundreds of computer terminals and dial-up lines.

Within the department we have our own computer lab reserved for graduate students, and we have many databases available in the Latin American area.

The fourth, and maybe the most important reason to join our department is that we make a special effort to recruit the best graduate students interested in Latin American politics in the United States and abroad. As a consequence, every year we host a distinguished cohort of incoming scholars, many of them consistently recruited from the best Latin American and U.S. universities. This creates a unique environment for the exchange of ideas, the understanding of the nuances of the region, and the advancement of comparative projects.

If you have any questions about the program or the application process, please don't hesitate to consult the Graduate Student Handbook or contact us via e-mail:

Sincerely,

Barry Ames, barrya@pitt.edu Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair,
Scott Morgenstern, smorgens@pitt.edu Associate Professor,
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, asp27@pitt.edu Assistant Professor