Natalia Bueno
Associate Professor Emory University
Natalia Bueno is a political scientist interested in public policy, housing policy, elections, and comparative politics. She examines the causes of nonstate welfare provision and the consequences of public policies, specifically housing policy, on political behavior and elections. She is an associate professor at Emory University.
Research at GRAIL
More about Natalia
Natália S. Bueno is a political scientist interested in public policy, housing policy, elections, and comparative politics. She is an associate professor at Emory University.
Bueno examines the causes of nonstate welfare provision and the consequences of public policies, specifically housing policy, on political behavior and elections. Her teaching focuses on Latin American politics, public policy, and research methods. She uses a multi-method approach with an emphasis on causal inference.
Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, Journal of Politics, Latin American Research Review, Science Advances, and World Politics, among other outlets.
She received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award from APSA’s Urban and Local Politics Section in 2024. Her research on nonstate welfare provision has received APSA’s Harold D. Lasswell Award for best dissertation in the field of public policy (2019), the James G. March Award from Yale’s Political Science department (2018), and an honorable mention for the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Award for best paper in the social sciences from the Latin American Studies Association’s Brazil Section (2019). Her collaborative work on public policy and housing has received the Best Paper on Public Policy Award from APSA’s Public Policy Section (2021), the Best Paper Award from REPAL (Red para el Estudio de la Economía Política de América Latina, 2022), the Best Comparative Policy Paper Award from APSA’s Public Policy Section (2024), and the Deil S. Wright Best Paper Award from APSA’s Federalism & Intergovernmental Relations Section (2026). Her collaborative research on elections and misinformation received the award for Best Research Article published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science in 2024 from APSA’s Experimental Research Section.
Bueno runs the Local Politics & Policy Lab at Emory University with Clara Bicalho, where they examine questions of local governments’ service provision and housing with a global perspective.
She is also a senior researcher at ConnectLab at the São Paulo School of Economics (FGV EESP), which conducts research on issues of public interest related to elections, information, and democracy.
Her work has been supported by Meta, Stanford Internet Observatory, MIT Gov/Lab, EGAP LatAm, SciBR, CNPq, Yale’s ISPS and MacMillan Center, and IPEA, among others.