Expertise
Comparative Politics, American Politics, Comparative Public Policy, Politics of Information and Communications Technology, Executive Compensation, Financial Regulation
Biography
Sandra L. Suárez (PhD, Yale University, 1994) is Professor of Political Science. She specializes in the study of American and comparative political economy and public policy in historical perspective. Suarez’ research deals with how political and economic actors shape the policymaking process and its outcomes across countries and over time. She has focused her attention principally on economic policymaking, zeroing in on critical junctures in search of patterns of behavior and interaction among the relevant formal and informal actors. She has conducted research on these topics in both developed and developing countries, employing primarily theory-driven process-tracing and case-study and small-sample methodologies. She has published work about business-government relationships, especially in the U.S., economic development policies, which involved a historical-comparative study of Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico, the politics of the diffusion of the Internet and mobile telecommunications, and the politics of financial regulation and executive compensation. The overarching questions that unite her work are firmly rooted in the political economy tradition: in what ways do governments chose to intervene in the economy, what are the interests of formal and informal actors, and what are the political and economic trade-offs? Suarez’ work has been published in the Journal of Comparative Politics, Politics & Society, Social Forces, Studies in Comparative International Development and Telecommunications Policy. She has been awarded fellowships by the Ford Foundation, the Center for International Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Institute for the Study of World Politics and the Juan March Foundation, Center for Advance Study in the Social Sciences in Madrid.