Murphy Seminar in Political Science: Sofia Vidotto (Tulane)
“From the Streets to the State: How Social Movement-Appointed Bureaucrats Affect Public Service Provision in Argentine Slums”
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research
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The Murphy Institute Seminar Series in Political Science
Each semester, The Murphy Institute proudly sponsors a dynamic series of seminars and workshops organized across key Tulane academic departments: Economics, Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, and Law. These seminar series serve as a vital platform for faculty, visiting scholars, and researchers to present cutting-edge work on contemporary issues in political economy, public policy, ethics, and social values. The Murphy Seminar in Political Science, held in partnership with the Department of Political Science, covers all aspects of contemporary political science, including comparative politics, public policy, international relations, American politics, and normative theory. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.
Sofía Vidotto is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CPPR). She studies the politics of service provision, bureaucracies, and social movements in Latin America. Her dissertation examines how social movement actors, once appointed to senior positions in the national bureaucracy, reshape the delivery of public services and the relationship between the state and residents of urban slums in Argentina. In other work, she explores how embeddedness and local organization condition the implementation of social policy in contexts of institutional neglect. Her research draws on 18 months of fieldwork, administrative data, and a survey experiment with slum leaders. Before earning her Ph.D., she earned a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina.