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).