Timothy Power
Timothy Power
Professor and Head of Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, Oxford University
Head of Oxford School of Global and Area Studies; Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme; Professor of Latin American Politics
Comparative political scientist with a deep commitment to interdisciplinary area studies. Completed PhD in political science at the University of Notre Dame in 1993. Then he was taught at Louisiana State University and Florida International University before arriving in Oxford in 2005. From 2008 to 2012 he directed the Latin American Centre, and became Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) in 2018.
His research concerns democratization and political institutions (parties, legislatures, and elections) in modern Latin America, especially Brazil. With Cesar Zucco (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), co-direct the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, which have recorded the opinions of Brazilian politicians in every parliament elected since 1990. Recently, he has been working with several colleagues on the cross-regional implications of some of Latin America’s experimentation with democratic institutions, particularly the question of how presidents cope with increasingly fragmented parliaments. This resulted in a recent book: Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power, Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems (Oxford University Press, 2018). It has been tremendously rewarding to conduct research that compares new democracies in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union.
Some of other recent publications include a book co-edited with Peter R. Kingstone, Democratic Brazil Divided (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), and a chapter with Scott Mainwaring and Fernando Bizzarro, “The Uneven Institutionalization of a Party System: Brazil,” in Mainwaring, ed., Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Journal articles forthcoming in 2019 include “Mapping Ideological Preferences in Brazilian Elections, 1994-2018: A Municipal-Level Study” with Rodrigo Rodrigues-Silveira, in the Brazilian Political Science Review; and “Flying Solo: Explaining Single-Party Cabinets under Minority Presidentialism,” with Paul Chaisty, in the European Journal of Political Research.
Research Disciplines: Political Science; Comparative Politics
Research Countries/Regions: Brazil, Latina America
