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Thomas Mustillo

Associate Professor of Global Affairs; Director, Governance and Policy Major

Tom Mustillo headshot
Office
3137 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone
(574) 631-9837
Email
tmustill@nd.edu

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Expertise

Democracy and democratization;; political parties and representation; social policy; Latin America; data science; open science and FAIR data principles

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. 

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." He is also active with the scientific infrastructure Monitoring Electoral Democracy . His 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 20th century. He has traveled extensively in Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, and Costa Rica. His work has been published in political science journals such as the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, and Electoral Studies and in interdisciplinary outlets such as Rationality & Society and the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. 

Courses

Recent Work