Diana Davila Gordillo is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Political Science.

More information about Diana Davila Gordillo

Diana Davila Gordillo is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University. Before taking this position, she was an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lake Forest College (Illinois, USA). She received her Ph.D. from Leiden University in 2021. Dávila Gordillo is a researcher in comparative politics working on political institutions and representation with Latin America as her regional focus. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of representation, identity, ethnicity, and institutions. She deploys a broad set of methodological tools in her work, chiefly qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis), which she combines with various other methodologies, including natural language processing, network analysis, and experimental methods.

Davila Gordillo studies women’s representation and party organisations. She is particularly interested in the barriers women face when participating in politics and how different stakeholders affect their experiences. She is interested in political parties’ survival, their linkages to voters, and the determinants of candidate selection (gender perspective). She also studies group identity construction (at the individual and group level) and how these identities affect party formation and persistence, the linkages between parties and voters, and inter-group relations.

She specialises in teaching qualitative methods at the graduate level, introductory and mid-level seminars on Comparative Politics, Women’s Representation, and Latin American Politics, and advanced-level seminars on women’s representation and political parties and democracy with a regional focus in Latin America. Her work is entirely bilingual: she researches, writes, and teaches in English and Spanish.

Before starting her career in academia, Davila Gordillo served as second secretary alternate representative of Ecuador at the Ecuadorian Mission to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C., until she joined the Permanent Mission in July 2012. Her work there concentrated on negotiating inter-American human rights conventions.

› Curriculum vitae Diana Davila Gordillo

PhD supervision

Diana Davila Gordillo is available to supervise PhD students and invites PhD research proposals in the areas of:

• Women’s representation
• Latin American Politics
• Political parties

See for more information on PhD positions:

› Institute of Political Science: PhD

Publications