Award-Winning Political Science Scholar Joins CDD-Ghana As Research Affiliate

Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) welcomes Prof Lauren M. MacLean, the Arthur F. Bentley Chair and Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, as the Center's new Research Affiliate.

Prof MacLean has over a decade's experience in political research and teaching at the graduate and under-graduate level. Her research interests focus on the politics of state formation, public service provision, and citizenship in Africa and in American Indian/Alaska Native communities in the United States of America. Recipient of the 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and the 2017 Carnegie Fellows award, Prof MacLean has published multiple-award-winning books, including Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa: Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. She has also published articles in a range of journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Environmental and Resource Economics, the International Journal of Public Administration, the Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Development. She is also known internationally for her work in social science methodology on the topic of field research, and has been actively involved in American Political Science Association (APSA) initiatives to expand research capacity in Africa.

Among other things, Prof MacLean will be investigating the politics of public service provision in the electricity sector in Africa, while at CDD-Ghana. She was recently selected as a 2017 Carnegie Fellow to investigate how electricity provision may promote democracy and environmental sustainability in Ghana. She is also collaborating with Jennifer Brass (IU-SPEA), Christopher Gore (Ryerson University, Canada) and Elizabeth Baldwin (University of Arizona) on a comparative project analyzing the politics of electricity provision in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. She will be working with both the Center and Indiana University for a year and a half.

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