Miriam Golden

Between 2019 and 2024, Miriam Golden held the Peter Mair Chair of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). Prior to her 2019 move to the EUI, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. During 2024–25, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI), with support from the King Center on Global Development.

Dr. Golden was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  Her research is in the area of political economy. She has conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa.  Her work has been honored with the Jewell-Loewenberg Prize, the Lawrence Longley Award, the Gregory A. Leubbert Book Award (runner-up), a Choice Award, and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), UK's Department for International Development (DfID), and the International Growth Center (ICG).

Dr. Golden is currently engaged in a large-scale study of how and when politicians secure reelection. A first publication from this project, co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva, appeared as The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World in 2023 in Cambridge University Press' Elements in Political Economy series. Her most recent book prior to that was Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017), written with economist Raymond Fisman. Her current field-based research concerns political responsiveness in Pakistan, on which she has an on-going collaboration with Saad Gulzar. Finally, with Alex Scacco and subsequently Tara Slough, she co-chaired the COVID-19 Model Challenges project.