Omar Garcia-Ponce is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at UC Davis and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD). He is also a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network. He received my PhD in Political Science from New York University.
His research focuses broadly on the political economy of conflict and development, with an emphasis on topics related to criminal and political violence. His research has tracked gun violence across the U.S.-Mexico border, investigated electoral integrity in Mexico and charted the agricultural growth of the Mexican drug sector. The following questions motivate his research: How does violent conflict influence political behavior, attitudes towards the state, and the development of institutions? And how do institutions and policies, in turn, affect patterns of violent conflict? His regional expertise is in Latin America, but he has a wide interest in the study of crime and violence in developing countries.
From a methodological perspective, his interests are in quantitative approaches to causal inference—including both experimental and quasi-experimental designs—and survey methodology. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and World Politics. It has also received mentions in The Washington Post, Time, Slate, and The New Republic, among others.