People

Daniel W. Gingerich is Professor of Politics specializing in comparative politics and Director of UVa’s Quantitative Collaborative. He also co-directs the Clear Lab (Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law), a rotating lab housed within UVa’s Democracy Initiative. Gingerich’s research focuses on the factors that make democracies more or less successful in providing public goods to their citizens. To that end, his scholarship concentrates on understanding the causes and consequences of phenomena such as corruption and clientelism, especially as relates to the historical experience of Latin America. He has published articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Economics and Politics, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He is the author of Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team (Cambridge University Press, series: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). His recent article "Ballot Reform as Suffrage Restriction," is the winner of the 2021 Luebbert Award for Best Article in Comparative Politics granted by the comparative politics section of the American Political Science Association. Another recent article published by Gingerich, “Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany” (co-authored with Jan Vogler), is the winner of the Kellogg/Notre Dame award for best paper in comparative politics presented at the 2021 Midwest Political Science Association conference. Current projects examine the origins and effects of vote secrecy, the political legacies of pandemics, and citizens’ attitudes towards policing and anti-crime policy. Prior to coming to Virginia, Gingerich held a fellowship at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.  During the 2012-2013 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2007.