Enrique Peruzzotti

Enrique Peruzzotti is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, an appointment he took up after receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1996.

Interested in the politics of social accountability, Mr. Peruzzotti early on joined his colleague Catalina Smulovitz in a research project on that subject. With support from the Tinker Foundation, they organized an international conference to discuss the role of the media and nongovernmental organizations in political discourse. One result of that conference was their jointly edited volume Controlando la Política. Ciudadanos y Medios en las Nuevas Democracias (Buenos Aires: Ed. Temas, 2002).

Mr. Peruzzotti also was concerned with the politics of human rights. Again working with Ms. Smulovitz and with the support of grants from the Ford Foundation, they were able to develop numerous case studies of efforts to expose and correct governmental wrongdoing, whether instances of corruption or abuses of constitutional limits or human rights. They presented their findings in their coedited volume Enforcing the Rule of Law. Social Accountability in Latin America (Pittsburgh UP, 2006). He has published dozens of articles on evolving concepts of democracy in academic journals and general-interest magazines and newspapers. His most recent publication is Participatory Innovations and Representative Democracy in Latin America (Woodrow Wilson Press/Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), which he edited with Andrew Seele.

He has held numerous visiting positions during his career, including at the University of London, University of New Mexico, Universidade Federal do Minas Gerais, the American University of Paris, and FLACSO in Ecuador. He has also been a resident Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, and the Center for Civil Society of the London School of Economics.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Enrique Peruzzotti will continue his study of the idea of democratic representation in Latin America, examining the competing concepts of representation as simply an authorization by election or as a more participatory form of government where the electorate’s control of its representatives extends beyond the ballot box to active citizen participation, including a degree of control and supervision of governmental officials. He will present his findings in a book tentatively titled Representation as Mediated Politics: Rethinking the linkages between participation and representation in Latin America.