International Forum for Democratic Studies Research Council Member

Jonathan Hartlyn

University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill

Jonathan Hartlyn is the senior associate dean for social sciences and global programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), and is the Kenneth J. Reckford Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

He has chaired the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association, and has also served as a member of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science at UNC-CH, and as director of the Institute of Latin American Studies (now the Institute for the Study of the Americas). He received a Johnston Award for Teaching Excellence from UNC in 2000.

Dr. Hartlyn received a B.A. with honors from Clark University and both a M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Before coming to UNC-CH in 1988, he taught at Vanderbilt University.

He is a recognized scholar in the areas of comparative politics of Latin America, especially with relation to questions of democratization, political institutions and state-society relations. He is the co-author of Latin America in the Twenty First Century: Toward a New Socio-Political Matrix (2003; Spanish publication, 2004 and Portuguese publication, 2007), and author of The Struggle for Democratic Politics in the Dominican Republic (1998; Spanish publication, 2008) and The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia (1988; Spanish publication, 1993). He is also the co-author of “Democracy in Latin America Since 1930” in Cambridge History of Latin America , Vol. VI, Part II (Leslie Bethell, ed., 1994; Spanish publication, 1997), and the co-editor of Latin American Political Economy (1986), The United States and Latin American in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War (1992), and Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America , 2nd edition (1999). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and edited books, including Latin American Politics & Society, Electoral Studies, Comparative Political Studies, Politics & Gender, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Democracy and Studies in Comparative International Development. A co-authored article on “Trust in Government Institutions:  The Effects of Performance and Participation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti,” was published online in 2014 by International Political Science Review and in print in 2016.