Thomas Mustillo

Biography & Research

Tom Mustillo is associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Kellogg Institute. He also is director of the governance and policy major for the Master of Global Affairs program.

Mustillo is a comparative political scientist who earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was awarded the 2024 Charles and Kathleen Manatt Fellowship by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the Electoral Integrity Project to research connections between obstacles to voting and political party polarization.

Mustillo also is an editor of the European Journal of Political Research’s Political Data Yearbook, and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Constituency-Level Elections Archive at the University of Michigan. In October 2025, he co-organized the workshop "FAIR Data and Democracy: Identifying Investments to Accelerate Computational Democracy Research." Mustillo’s teaching spans substantive topics related to democracy, party politics, and Latin American politics, as well as courses on quantitative research methods, research design, complexity science, and data science. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2018, he was an associate professor of political science at Purdue University.

Mustillo’s current research examines political representation, parties and party systems, and democracy. He is particularly interested in understanding highly unstable electoral contexts. He has employed diverse research methods in his work, including agent-based models for the study of party competition, longitudinal models of electoral instability, elite interviews of party founders to understand the conditions that lead to the launch of new parties, and archival research in Ecuador to secure vulnerable records about party competition in the late 20^th century. He has traveled extensively in Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, and Costa Rica. His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Electoral Studies, and other outlets across several fields.

Mustillo is a faculty fellow of the Keough School's Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Courses

• Simulating Politics and Global Affairs (undergraduate course for global affairs major or international development studies minor)

Recent Work

• "Building a FAIR, linked, and open data ecosystem: innovation cascades in political science" (European Political Science)
• “Floating Voters and the Rise of New Left Parties: Electoral Volatility During Party System Transformation,” (Latin American Politics and Society)
• “Party Nationalization Following Democratization: Modeling Change in Turbulent Times,” (Democratization)
  *Winner of the Frank Cass Award for Best Article published in Democratization in 2017