Zoila Ponce de Leon

I am an Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. I earned my Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018.

My book project, Political Parties and Policy Reform: Expansion of Healthcare in Latin America, explores the variation in the expansion of social benefits across new democracies. Through the comparison of healthcare reform processes in Chile, Mexico, and Peru in the 2000s, I analyze how programmatic versus non-programmatic parties affect the quality of reform and its implementation. This study is based on original data I gathered during 12 months of field research, including over 150 in-depth interviews.

I study other factors that influence the expansion of social benefits as well as political representation, including gender bias on legislator responsiveness, the expansion of the private healthcare sector, party-voter policy congruence and clientelism, and immigration attitudes. My work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, and Revista de Ciencia Política.