Prof. Dr. Mariana Llanos

Reserach Area

Democratic Institutions in the Global South

Short Biography

Mariana Llanos holds the joint professorship for “Democratic Institutions in the Global South” between the University of Erfurt and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). She is a Lead Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies and was, between 2015 and 2022, the Head of GIGA’s Research Program 1 “Accountability and Participation.”

Mariana Llanos studied political science in Argentina, her country of origin, and later obtained a D.Phil in Politics (1999) from the University of Oxford, St. Antony's College, in the United Kingdom with the thesis “Privatization and Democracy in Argentina” (Palgrave, 2002). Since her graduation, Mariana Llanos has published extensively in English, Spanish, and Portuguese both in academic journals and books.  Her work on Latin American comparative political institutions has appeared, for example, in Government & Opposition, Democratization,  Journal of Democracy, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Latin American Politics and Society, and the Journal of Latin American Studies. The organized a Special Issue on presidential term limits in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa that was published in Democratization in 2022. In 2023, she co-edited the volume Latin America in Times of Turbulence. Presidentialism under Stress (with Leiv Marsteintredet), which is open access and can be downloaded entirely from here.

In 2022 she won the American Political Science Association (APSA) Legislative Studies Section's 2022 Jewell-Loewenberg Prize in Comparative Politics with the article "Oversight or Representation? Public Opinion and Impeachment Resolutions in Argentina and Brazil" co-authored with Aníbal Pérez Liñán, and available via open-access. The award recognizes the best article published in Legislative Studies Quarterly in 2021 in the field of comparative politics. In 2015, her article “The Institutional Presidency in Latin America. A Comparative Analysis”, co-authored with Magna Inacio, obtained the 2014 Founders Award honouring Bert Rockman, which is granted by the Presidents and Executive Politics Section of APSA. The article was published in Presidential Studies Quarterly. Her most recent research interests are concerned with courts and presidency relations, and the personalization of political power.

She currently supervises the dissertations of Jayane Maia, Eduardo Tamaki Ryo and Alina Ripplinger.