Assistant Professor
Natán Skigin is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of International Affairs. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He received my PhD in Political Science in 2024 from the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Skigin is a scholar of democracy, conflict, and migration, with a regional focus on Latin America. His research investigates the causes of political and criminal violence and their impact on democratic institutions, intergroup relations, and policy outcomes—from immigrants’ integration into host societies and citizens’ support for state repression to criminal governance, democratic accountability, and societal mobilization for transitional justice. His work blends fieldwork with survey and field experiments to address a key challenge contemporary democracies face: How can we motivate the political mobilization of citizens to demand justice for human rights violations? He answers this question by studying how marginalized groups mobilize citizens to hold politicians accountable for abusing the state’s coercive power.
His research has been published or conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics, Political Psychology, Political Science Research and Methods, Party Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly [2x], and Research and Politics, and is under advance contract with Cambridge University Press. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), APSA, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), and the Kellogg Institute, among others. Dr. Skigin was also a 2023-2024 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar, a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar, and the 2023 APSA Political Psychology Distinguished Junior Scholar.
