Ben Ross Schneider is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT-Brazil program.  Prior to moving to MIT in 2008, he taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University.  His books include Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America (2004), Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America (2013), Designing Industrial Policy in Latin America:  Business-Government Relations and the New Developmentalism (2015), and New Order and Progress:  Democracy and Development in Brazil (2016).  He has also written on topics such as economic reform, democratization, education, labor markets, inequality, and business groups. 

Rachel Beatty Riedl is the Director and John S. Knight Professor of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and Professor in the Government Department and School of Public Policy at Cornell University. Riedl is the author of the award-winning Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Party Systems in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-author of From Pews to Politics: Religious Sermons and Political Participation in Africa (with Gwyneth McClendon, Cambridge University Press 2019). She studies democracy and institutions, governance, authoritarian regime legacies, and religion and politics in Africa.  She has published in the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, African Affairs, American Political Science Review, and Journal of Democracy, among others.  A former Kellogg Institute visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Yale Program on Democracy Fellow, Faculty Fulbright Scholar, Chair of the APSA section Democracy and Autocracy, and Fellow and Director of the Scientific Council at the Institute for Advanced Study (Nantes), she holds a PhD from Princeton University.  Riedl was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has conducted policy analysis on issues pertaining to governance, elections, democratic representation and identity politics.  She serves on the Editorial Committee of World Politics and the Editorial Board of African Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, and Africa Spectrum.  She is co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa.