Simón Ballesteros
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago. In May 2025, I defended my PhD dissertation at Georgetown University. I use quantitative and qualitative methods to study the causes and effects of constitution-making, legal and political institutions, and democracy, with a regional emphasis on Latin America.
My dissertation examines the determinants of the emergence of democratic processes of constitutional change using statistical methods in an original dataset that codifies a set of attributes of all constitution-making processes since 1945. Complementing that analysis, I employed process tracing to identify the causal sequence through which social conflict led to a highly democratic (if failed) process of constitutional change in Chile.
A second research agenda delves into the institutional foundations of democratic backsliding in Latin America, with a special focus on the role of the Institutions of Government Accountability (comptrollers, ombudsman, etc.) in this process.
During the 2023-2024 Academic Year I was a Predoctoral Fellow with the SIGLA database project (State and Institutions of Governance in Latin America, www.sigladata.org). I hold a BA in Economics and an MA in Economic Analysis from the University of Chile. For more information, please see my CV or send me an email (sballesteros@uchicago.edu).
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