Kenneth F. Greene is an Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on authoritarian regimes as well as elections and voting behavior in new democracies, with a particular emphasis on Mexico.
His first book, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective (2007), argues that economic privatization threatens the hyper-incumbency advantages dominant parties derive from politicizing public resources. This project and related papers won the 2008 Best Book Award and the 2007 and 2015 Best Paper Awards from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.
Current research centers on vote buying and the quality of elections, arguing that democratic competition undermines political machines’ ability to buy support. One paper in this agenda won the 2017 Pi Sigma Alpha / Franklin L. Burdette Prize for the best paper presented at the previous year’s meeting of the American Political Science Association.
He was Principal Investigator of the Mexico 2012 Panel Study of voters, the 2018 Elections and Quality of Democracy Panel Survey, and 14 other survey projects, as well as co-editor of Mexico’s Evolving Democracy (2015). His articles have appeared in Political Analysis, the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, Foreign Affairs en Español, and other outlets. In 2014-2015, he was a Santander Chair of Excellence at the Carlos III University and Juan March Institute in Madrid.
He teaches on research methods, political parties, Mexico’s politics, and U.S.-Mexico relations. Despite assigning a “too much reading!”, he has been recognized with a 2011 Raymond Dickson Teaching Award and a 2009 Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award for undergraduate education at UT-Austin.