Skip to main content

Department of Political Science

Jonathan Hiskey

Associate Chair
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Professor
Professor of Sociology (by courtesy)

Jonathan Hiskey is Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on the role local politics play in the formation of democratic citizenries across the emerging democracies of Latin America. His recent book (co-authored with M. Moseley), Life in the Political Machine (Oxford University Press 2020), explores the ways in which subnational "dominant-party enclaves" in Mexico and Argentina shape the political attitudes and behaviors of their citizens. The work highlights the pernicious role that such uneven political landscapes can have in efforts to consolidate and deepen democracy. A concurrent line of research concerns the political implications of migration for sending communities across Latin America, analyzing the political lives of those individuals with connections to a migrant network and the role they play in community politics. Hiskey's work on these topics has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies and the Latin American Research Review. Before arriving at Vanderbilt, Hiskey was an assistant professor at the University of California-Riverside. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh where he received the Gabriel A. Almond award from the American Political Science Association for best dissertation in comparative politics.

Representative publications