Political Science

Débora Duque is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Politics. She is broadly interested in studying the political economy of development, political elites, and the functioning of democracy at the local level. Her dissertation project focuses on the causes and consequences of dynastic politics for democratic regimes. More specifically, she aims to understand why the access and exercise of power become dominated by family networks in some places and not in others and the implications for governance and citizen-state interactions. To address these questions, she is looking at the subnational variation of dynastic politics in the context of Brazil. Currently, she is also collaborating on multiple projects related to violence and environmental conflicts in the Amazon region, state capacity, and accountability.

Prior to attending Brown, she worked as a journalist in the Northeast of Brazil, covering local and national politics, and served as the head of the communication department at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology. She obtained her B.A. in Journalism and Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and M.A. in Political Science at Brown.