Maria Gallego
Areas of Expertise
- Elections and Voting
- Political Economy and Public Economics
Biography
Though born in Colombia, I lived in France, the United States and Yugoslavia before finally ending up in Canada. I completed my baccalaureate studies in Economics at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. After working for the Foreign Trade Agency of the Colombian government, I came to Canada where I earned a Masters of Arts and a PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto. I was a faculty member at Concordia University and at the University of Toronto before coming to Laurier in 1995.
My interests are mainly in governance and political economy issues. For my PhD dissertation, I studied how economic shocks affect the fate of dictators and elected leaders. Throughout my graduate studies, I became interested in policy making in parliamentary democracies. My scholarship includes applications of economic analysis in political economy and bargaining. I have also studied the selection of bargaining solutions when bargaining opponents may be of different types, modeling intergovernmental negotiations, and understanding how voters influence policies in multi-party (>3) parliamentary democracies such as Canada.
Currently, I am working on modeling multilateral negotiations such those encountered in the intergovernmental federal negotiations between the Canadian Federal and Provincial governments or the multi-lateral negotiations of the European Union. I am also working on modelling elections in democracies and anocracies (authoritarian regimes where the autocrat operates alongside a legislature). Other projects include studying how campaign advertising affects electoral outcomes.
Languages
- English
- French
- Spanish