Matthew M. Singer

Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor

Political Science

Professor Singer (Duke PhD, 2007) is generally interested in questions of how voters achieve political representation and how the political and social context affects political behavior. His research studies how the public evaluates government performance, looking at the impact of economic and political outcomes on support for the incumbent and democracy. He is particularly interested in the conditions under which economic performance is more or less salient to different groups and in different places. He studies this question in a broad comparative context, with many projects focused specifically on Latin America while others focus on broader samples of countries.

Professor Singer is one of the directors of the Executive Approval Project, which compiles comparable data on presidential and prime minister approval from around the world. He is the director of the State Executive Approval Dataset (SEAD), which compiled data on governor approval in the United States. He was a collaborator on the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project, an expert survey on modes of representation (especially programmatic and clientelist linkages) that are used in 88 countries around the world and the Political Representation, Parties and Presidents Survey, an expert survey focused on representation and populism in Latin America, Europe, and beyond. He is a collaborator with the Latin American Public Opinion Project and contributed to the 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2019 Reports. In 2015 he was a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame. Finally, he is the associate editor of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties.

Professor Singer’s research has been published in The British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, The European Journal of Political Research, The Journal of Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, Perspectives on Politics, Política y Gobierno, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Research and Politics, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly among other outlets. Links to most of this work are available through his Google Scholar profile and supplemental appendices are available on his dataverse. He is the co-editor of the book The Latin American Voter: Pursuing Representation and Accountability in Challenging Contexts (University of Michigan Press, with Elizabeth Zechmeister and Ryan Carlin) and the co-editor of the book Economics and Politics Revisited: Executive Approval and the New Calculus of Support (Oxford University Press, with Timothy Hellwig).

Professor Singer is the Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor and will direct the political science department’s honors program for the 2019-2025 period. Please email with any questions.