Eugenia C. Aguirre-Raftacco

Biography

Eugenia Aguirre is a first-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in Comparative Politics, and a Ph.D. fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Her research examines democracy and local governance in Central America, with a focus on how local authorities and institutions interact with democratic backsliding. She is also interested in gender and youth’s political representation.

She holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Costa Rica (UCR). Before Notre Dame, Eugenia worked at the intersection of research, teaching, and public policy in Costa Rica. She served as a Legislative Advisor to Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly and as Advocacy and Communications Director for the National Association of Local Governments. From 2020 to 2024, she was a primary instructor in the Department of Political Science at the UCR. She also conducted research for the Democracy Chapter of Costa Rica's State of the Nation Program and the National Politics Observatory at the UCR. During her time in Tulane, she was a research assistant at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research and to the Chapel Hill Expert Survey–Latin America.

Her work has been published in the Revista de Derecho Electoral, Revista Científica Administrar lo Público, Revista Elecciones, and Anuario CIEP, among others. She has presented at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the Central American Congress of Political Science, and other conferences.

Areas of Interest

Political institutions, democratic backsliding, regime transitions, subnational politics, women and representation, Central America