Ruth Berins Collier

Ruth Berins Collier is the Heller Professor of Political Science and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Collier is a distinguished comparative political scientist whose research, across Latin America, Africa, and Europe, has focused on forms of popular participation, political regime and regime change, and labor politics. Her broad, rigorous, theoretically-informed work on mass participation and regime transitions uses diverse historical, quantitative, and case-study comparisons to show how the intensity and sequencing of changes in mass participation shape the dynamics of political systems. She has made important contributions to understanding the national independence period around 1960 in Africa; the institutionalization of labor movements in Latin America; an early phase of Mexico's democratization; democratization in Europe and South America (historically and in 1970-90); and the recent partial eclipse of labor unions as power brokers in South America. Collier has had a major influence in each of these areas. The major book she coauthored with David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (1991, 2002), was one of the first extended analyses in political science focused on critical junctures and path dependence.