Beatriz Magaloni is a nonresident scholar in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, the director of the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab, and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the political economy of development. Magaloni’s work covers the following themes: the study of authoritarian regimes;  violence, public security, and human rights; “non-state” forms of governance; and distributive and the provision of public goods. Much of her research has been on Latin America.

Magaloni is the author of Voting for Autocracy (2006, Cambridge University Press),  winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award for the best book written in the previous two years on parties and elections and the Comparative Democratization Section Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. 

She is also the author of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico (2016, Cambridge University Press), co-authored with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez. 

Her article, "Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance and Police Violence," was published in the American Political Science Review in May 2020 (with Edgar Franco and Vanesa Melo) and won the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in American Political Science Review. 

Magaloni’s article "Institutionalized Police Brutality: Torture, the Militarization of Security, and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico" (with Luis Rodriguez) was published in the American Political Science Review and was featured in the journal's monthly blog.