Katherine Bersch Nancy Akers and J. Mason Wallace Assistant Professor of Political Science

During academic year 2022-23, I will be a Kellogg Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil.

I am the Nancy Akers and J. Mason Wallace Assistant Professor of Political Science at Davidson College. I am also an investigator with Stanford Governance Project, as well as a co-founder of the Global Survey of Public Servants.

My research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and public policy, with an emphasis on governance reform and state capacity in Latin America. I am the author of When Democracies Deliver: Governance Reform in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which won the Donna Lee van Cott Best Book Award (LASA), the Levine Memorial Book Prize (IPSA), and the APSA Prize for the Best Book Published in Public Administration. My research has also been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Politics, Governance, Political Research Quarterly, Annual Review of Political Science, Public Administration Review and Studies in Comparative International Development, among others.  

Prior to joining the faculty at Davidson, I held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and McGill University's Institute for the Study of International Development.

I teach courses in comparative politics and comparative public policy including a seminar on corruption and development as well as research methods and statistics.