About me

Welcome to my website! I am a Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile). My research is organized around two lines of inquiry: political behavior and public opinion in comparative perspective, which includes political participation, democratic values, and electoral behavior; and the politics of the radical right in Latin America and beyond.

I hold a PhD (2024) and a Master’s in Political Science from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with concentrations in Comparative Politics and Research Methods. During my doctoral studies I was an ANID fellow, and I later held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). I earned my undergraduate degree in Political Science from Universidad Diego Portales.

I am currently developing a research project funded by Universidad Alberto Hurtado, “Dealignment or Realignment? Studying Electoral Behavior in Chile in Comparative Perspective.” The project asks whether the new parties that have emerged in Chile, including the far-right party currently in government, reflect a dealignment or a realignment of the electorate. Drawing on both the European literature on the radical right and the emerging regional scholarship, one of its key contributions is a longitudinal account of where votes for far-right parties come from in a setting where these parties are still relatively new to Latin America.

Alongside this project, I am working on several papers across both lines of research. On political behavior and public opinion, these include a study of how electoral reform, through changes in district magnitude, affects voter turnout; an analysis of the electoral origins of New Left voters in Chile; and a reconceptualization of the “outsider” that rethinks how we classify outsider candidates in a party system. On the radical right, my current work traces where far-right voters come from and how their attitudes evolve over time using longitudinal survey data (with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Matías Bargsted); maps the electoral ceiling of the radical right across Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Javier Sajuria); compares the mobilization strategies of far-right parties across Latin America (with Federica Sánchez-Staniak and Talita Tanscheit); and develops the conceptualization and measurement of nativist discourse in the populist radical right beyond Europe.

Finally, my teaching centers on quantitative methods. Throughout the year I teach Introduction to Statistics, Basic Quantitative Methods, Advanced Quantitative Methods, and Electoral Analysis and Political Behavior.

For any questions or inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact me at npalma [at] uahurtado [dot] cl