Mine  Eder  is  a  Professor  of  Political  Science  at  the  Department  of  Political Science and International Relations of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. She received a Fulbright to pursue graduate degree at the University of Virginia where she  received  her  MA  and  PhD  in  Politics.  She  also  taught  at  Lewis  and  Clark College  and  was  a  visiting  professor  at  Yale  and  George  Washington  University. She  specialized  on  comparative  political  economy  of development  and  published widely  on  various  aspects of  Turkey’s political  economy  ranging  from  regional cooperation,  welfare provision,  poverty  and  informality,  problems  of  developmentalism,  populism  as  well  as  Turkey-EU relations.  Since  2006,  her  research  interests  shifted  to  include  an  exploration  of  interstices  of  migration and urban transformation in Istanbul; domestic female migrant workers, shuttle traders, displacement and gentrification in Istanbul's neighborhoods as well as local governance.

Karen studies democratization in Africa.  Her work sits at the intersection of institutional and behavioral approaches to politics, with a particular focus on how ethnic and racial divisions and formal and informal institutions shape voting behavior and election outcomes in emerging democracies.  She has written about South African politics in her book, Framing the Race in South Africa: the Political Origins of Racial Census Elections (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She has also written about electoral institutions, electoral integrity, and issues related to survey design in Africa.

Adam Harris is Associate Professor of Development Politics at the Department of Political science at University College London. Adam received his Ph.D. from New York University in August 2015. He specializes in ethnic and African politics. In his dissertation, he seeks to understand why some voters (up to 52% of African voters) do not support their ethnic group’s party. To answer this question, he develops and measures the concept of ethnic proximity that moves beyond the academic convention of co-ethnicity to more fully consider the complex role ethnicity plays in political preference formation. The dissertation argues that the degree to which ethnic group membership influences political preferences is determined by one’s position in her ethnic group, which is in turn determined by her ethnic attributes (her ethnic proximity). The dissertation uses original panel survey and experimental data to test the effect of ethnic proximity on voter preferences in South Africa. The results are also replicated in the US and Ugandan contexts. In short, his dissertation concludes that those who are less proximate to their own group and more proximate to an out-group are more likely to be swing voters and will have weaker preferences for their ethnic group’s party. Adam has also conducted research on ethnic identifiability (recently published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution), ethnic and immigrant prejudice, the determinants of political protests, ideological ideal point estimation among African legislators, and the effects of foreign aid in recipient countries. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, New York University, and Columbia University.

Pierre F. Landry is a Professor of Government and Public Administration, Co-Director of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,  a  Fellow at the Research Center for the Study of Contemporary China at Peking University and as well as a GLD Scholar. He was trained in economics and law at Sciences-Po (Paris) and received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is also an alumnus of the Hopkins-Nanjing program. His research interests focus on comparative local governance, Asian and Chinese politics, quantitative comparative analysis and survey research. His work has focused on governance and the political management of officials in China and public opinion research, and the development of spatial sampling technique for survey research.  Besides articles and book chapters in comparative politics and political methodology, he is the author of “Decentralized Authoritarianism in China” with Cambridge University Press (2008). He collaborates with the Governance and Local Development project as well as the UNDP and the World Bank on developing indicators of the variability of local governance in a variety of countries, including Vietnam, Tunisia, Malawi, Zambia and Kenya.  Website: http://www.gpa.cuhk.edu.hk/en-gb/people/academic-staff/faculty/prof-landry-pierre and https://pierreflandry.wordpress.com/

Ellen Lust is the Founding Director of the Programs on Governance and Local Development at Yale University (est. 2013) and at the University of Gothenburg (est. 2015), and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She also serves as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC. She received her M.A. in Modern Middle East and North African Studies (1993) and PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan (1997). She held faculty positions at Rice University and Yale University, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Graduate Studies (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Straus Institute at NYU. Ellen has conducted fieldwork and implemented surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia. She has authored numerous books and articles, including most recently, Trust, Voice and Incentives: Learning from Local Successes in Service Delivery in the Middle East and North Africa, (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015) in collaboration with Hana Brixi and Michael Woolcock. Her current research is aimed at developing local governance indicators and examining the role of social institutions in governance. She was a co-founder of the Transitional Governance Project, a founding associate editor of Middle East Law and Governance, and has served as an advisor and consultant to such organizations as the Carter Center, Freedom House, NDI, UNDEF, UNDP, USAID, and the World Bank. Foundations such as the Moulay Hicham Foundation, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Swedish Research Council have supported her work. More at http://gld.commons.yale.edu/ and http://transitionalgovernanceproject.org