Wesleyan portrait of James W. McGuire

James W. McGuire

John E. Andrus Professor of Government

Professor of Government

110 Mt. Vernon Street, 204
860-685-2487

Professor, Latin American Studies

110 Mt. Vernon Street, 204
860-685-2487

jmcguire@wesleyan.edu

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BA Swarthmore College
MA University of California, Berkeley
PHD University of California, Berkeley

James W. McGuire

James W. McGuire specializes in comparative politics, focusing on democracy, social welfare policies, and public health in Latin America and East Asia.

James W. McGuire, Professor in the Department of Government, received a BA from Swarthmore and a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in comparative politics, focusing on democracy, social welfare policies, and public health in Latin America and East Asia. He is a core faculty member of Wesleyan’s Latin American Studies Program and is a recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. McGuire has written articles and chapters on democracy, democratization, autocratization, social welfare policies, public health, and mortality decline. His first book, Peronism without Perón (Stanford, 1997), related the organizational structure of Peronism, the Argentine political movement founded in the 1940s by Juan Perón, to Argentina’s troubles in consolidating democracy in the second half of the twentieth century. A second book, Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge, 2010), showed how democracy and primary health care provision help to explain why some countries do better than others at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. It won the 2011 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. A third book, Democracy and Population Health (Cambridge, 2020), evaluated indicators of the two phenomena, assessed how particular dimensions of democracy have affected population health, and explored how population health has affected democracy. McGuire’s most recent publication is “The Trump Vote and Covid-19 Vaccination Across US States, US Counties, and Connecticut Towns” (Regional and Federal Studies, 2023).

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

Fall 2023: Tuesdays and Wednesdays 2:00 to 3:30 at 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Office 214. The 110 Mt. Vernon building, which looks like a house, is around the corner from the Admissions Office, next to the Writing Center which is at 116 Mt. Vernon.

Courses

Fall 2023
GOVT 157 - 02
Democracy & Dictatorship

GOVT 302 - 01
Latin American Politics

Spring 2024
GOVT 271 - 01
Political Econ Developing Coun

GOVT 382 - 01
Erosion of Democracy