Scholarship and Biography
Alejandro Trelles is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Brandeis University. His research interests are elections, electoral management, redistricting, political parties, and political representation. His most recent work focuses on the formal and informal aspects of electoral autonomy in Latin America and Africa and the effect that electoral autonomy has on democratic stability and consolidation. He has fieldwork experience in Venezuela, Mexico, Ghana, Kenya, and Egypt. He co-authors two political analysis books: Anatomy of the PRI (Random House, 2006) and AMLO: Political and Personal History of the Head of Government of Mexico City (Random House, 2004).
He has more than fifteen years of experience working on elections and electoral management from a comparative perspective. He has worked as an independent consultant in electoral organization and constituency boundary delimitation (redistricting) for the Organization of American States. He is also a co-principal investigator in the Public Mapping Project Mexico (PMP). He has worked closely with Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE, formerly IFE) in the last decade and during the last three rounds of redistricting. His research has received support from the Electoral Integrity Project in Venezuela, the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the African Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and support from the Norman and Tomberg Funds at Brandeis University.
He holds a Ph.D. and an MA in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA from ITAM in Mexico City. His work has been published in academic venues such as Political Geography, Election Law Journal, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Política y Gobierno.