Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Ph.D.

pochoaespe@haverford.edu

Haverford College

Country: United States (Pennsylvania)

About Me:

Paulina Ochoa Espejo (MA, Essex; PhD, Johns Hopkins) is an Associate Professor of political science at Haverford College. Before joining Haverford, she was an Assistant Professor at Yale University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Notre Dame. She has been a visiting professor at CIDE in Mexico City, Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She is the author of The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011), co–editor of the Oxford Handbook of Populism (OUP, 2017) and articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Political Philosophy and Journal of Politics among others. She’s currently finishing a book manuscript entitled Just Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (OUP, Forthcoming).

Research Interests

Political Theory

Immigration & Citizenship

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Borders And Walls

Populism

Territorial Rights

Democratic Theory

Popular Sovereignty

Latin American Thought

Countries of Interest

United States

Mexico

Publications:

Books Written:

(2017) The Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford University Press

Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.

(2010) The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Penn State University Press

Democracy is usually conceived as based on self-rule or rule by the people, and it is this which is taken to ground the legitimacy of the democratic form of government. But who constitutes the people? Democratic political theory has a potentially fatal weakness at its core unless it can answer this question satisfactorily. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo examines the problems the concept of the people raises for liberal democratic theory, constitutional theory, and critical theory. She argues that to solve these problems, the people cannot be conceived as simply a collection of individuals. Rather, the people should be seen as a series of events, an ongoing process unfolding in time. She then offers a new theory of democratic peoplehood, laying the foundations for a new theory of democratic legitimacy.