Sam Handlin is an associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College.  His teaching and research focuses on the comparative politics of developing countries, with a regional emphasis on Latin America and a substantive focus on democracy, authoritarianism, and electoral politics.  He is the author of State Crisis in Fragile Democracies: Polarization and Political Regimes in South America (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the author/editor of Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).  His work has also been published in numerous academic journals.

Before coming to Swarthmore, Handlin received a PhD in Political Science from Berkeley, spent a year as a Visiting Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and taught for six years at the University of Utah.