About Monika Nalepa



Associate Professor

Political Science

The University of Chicago


Connect

Email: mnalepa@uchicago.edu

Website: http://monikanalepa.weebly.com


Biographical sketch and research interests

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. I teach a wide range of courses in Comparative Politics and Formal Theory. My research interests span transitional justice, the study of comparative institutions such as legislatures, political organizations such as parties, and most recently authoritarian legacies. I have published Skeletons in the Closet, Transitional Justice in the PostCommunist World with Cambridge University Press. This book received the Leon D. Epstein Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA in 2012. I was also awarded the Best Book award by theComparative Democratization section APSA in 2011. Currently I am finishing a book with Royce Carroll (University of Essex) on the emergence of programmatic parties in PostCommunist Europe. The book focuses on the development of parties in the legislative arena, using the wealth of data on legislative voting that has become available since these countries transitioned from Communism in the late 80s and early 90s. I am also working on a series of papers with Grigore Pop-Eleches (Princeton University) on the dynamics shaping anti-authoritarian attitudes in Poland prior to 1989. These papers make use of 17 high quality nationally representative surveys taken between the lifting of Martial Law in Poland in 1983 and Roundtable Negotiations of 1989 that eventually brought down Communism in Europe.