Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Tulia Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science and former Director of CLALS, was awarded the 2024 Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award for her longstanding scholarly contributions to the study of federalism and subnational politics. From her groundbreaking research on Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America (2010) where developed an original comparative sequential theory and method to show how decentralization policy outcomes depend on the timing and order of the processes, to her more recent work on the origins and designs of local participatory health projects and prior consultation policy in extractive economies, Falleti has made lasting contributions to the comparative and historical institutional study of politics. The award committee also recognized her continued research and work on Indigenous politics, including political participation and incorporation in public policy, and her leadership on the academic collaborations centering on Indigenous politics, and her directorship of the monumental multi-year Penn-Mellon Just Futures Dispossessions in the Americas project, carried out by many Penn faculty and affiliates.
Please read the full commendation by the American Political Science Association’s Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section Below. The Award Committee included: Jefferey Sellers (University of Southern California), Tracy Beck Fenwick (Australian National University Recipient), and Eduardo Moncada (Barnard College).
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Tulia Falleti, currently Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is this year’s recipient of the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award. The Award Committee was unanimous in concluding that Professor Falleti’s many eminent contributions to the field of comparative federalism, subnational politics, and intergovernmental relations, making her fully deserving of this recognition.
Professor Falleti’s work has focused on the politics of decentralization in Latin America, a region that in recent decades has been at the forefront of efforts in the developing world to decentralize government and policymaking. Her work has laid essential empirical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for analysis of politics of decentralization, and for our historical understanding of how subnational institutions shape politics over time. Her first major work on decentralization, developed in her book Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and her influential 2005 article in the American Political Science Review, makes the crucial observation that not only preexisting forms of states, but the temporal sequence of reforms themselves can determine both how decentralization happens and what forms it ultimately takes. Her sequential theory of decentralization employs a sophisticated conceptualization of the subject, emphasizing its distinct political, administrative, and fiscal dimensions. The theory is grounded in carefully researched comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries over several decades of reforms. Comparison among these cases provides a compelling demonstration of how the types of reform that took place first were decisive for the subsequent politics and the ultimate outcomes of decentralization. Its application has proven useful to analyzing the timing in sequencing of decentralizing reforms in federal countries far beyond the region from where her theory originated, thus making an important contribution to federalism studies.
From its conceptualization to its mechanism-based explanation to its hypotheses, this research has helped lay foundations for a proliferating literature on decentralized institutions, intergovernmental relations, and their politics throughout the developing world. Falleti’s groundbreaking research also has made important contributions to furthering the development of the subnational comparative method in Latin American politics. With Max Cameron (2005), Falleti contributed to a novel research agenda by examining the separation of powers at the subnational level and how this impacted democracy in federal systems. The comparative analysis of historical processes has played a growing role in this literature. In her closely related work on concepts and analytical methods of historical institutionalism, Professor Falleti has also made important contributions to a more general conceptual and analytical toolkit for comparative historical analysis of the politics of policymaking, political institutions, and development over time. Her work on how to take the context of causal mechanisms into account in comparative analysis, for example, holds lessons for any kind of subnational comparison.
Professor Falleti’s most recent work has applied some of the same tools and historically informed thinking in research on the wider field of territorial politics, intergovernmental relations and state-society relations– with an emphasis on Indigenous politics. Her research in Bolivia and beyond analyzes how endogenous dynamics of societal mobilization and engagement at the community level have strengthened the inclusiveness and effectiveness of participatory institutions in public health, resource extraction and other domains, with implications for politics at multiple jurisdictional scales.
The most recent turn in her work has expanded its historical scope even further while adhering to Falleti’s emphasis on territory and politics at varying levels of the state. Falleti contends that the politics of Indigenous rights has broad implications for issues at the center of political science -- including the territorial organization of states and the practices and meanings of democracy -- but remains markedly understudied. Her latest work starts to address this gap through a major project funded by the Mellon Foundation that exemplifies interdisciplinarity and the bridging of rigorous scholarship and practice entitled "Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Cultural Heritage from La Conquista to the Present." As the Principal Investigator for this project, Falleti is leading an ambitious collaboration to map forms of material and ideological dispossession in the Americas from 1492 to the present and identify paths to restorative justice.