Karen L. Remmer is an American political scientist, academic, author and researcher. She is a professor emerita of political science at Duke University.
Remmer has authored over 80 publications. Her expertise lies in comparative politics and political economy with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She has published widely on electoral competition, military rule, institutional change and political economy of Latin America. She is the author of Party Competition and Public Policy: Argentina and Chile, and Military Rule in Latin America.
Remmer was associate editor of the Latin American Research Review from 1981 till 2001. She has also served as a co-president of Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies from 1979 till 1980.
Education
Remmer obtained a bachelor's degree in political science from Wellesley College in 1966. She then enrolled at the University of Chicago and received her master's and doctoral degree in 1968 and 1974, respectively. She also studied as a post-graduate research student in the Department of Politics at the London School of Economics between 1968 and 1970.
Career
Following her master's studies, Remmer held a brief appointment as a lecturer at Lewis and Clark College before joining the University of New Mexico in 1974 as professor of political science. She then left and took up an appointment as a full professor at Duke University in 2001.
Research
Remmer's research in the field of comparative politics has focused on political economy and political institutions with central emphasis on Latin America.
Political economy of Latin America
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Remmer wrote series of articles exploring the relationship between economics and politics in the Latin American region. Her research on the electoral impact of the debt crisis of the 1980s provided evidence that economic crisis provoked electoral instability and undermined the support of incumbents without giving rise to political extremism, political polarization, or otherwise undermining democratic institutions. The resilience of democracy in the region was further emphasized in her analysis of the sustainability of democracy in South America in the post-1944 period. Drawing on comparisons between democratic and authoritarian regimes, her research underlines the impact of political institutions on regime durability by showing that economic performance has conditioned the risk of authoritarian, but not democratic, breakdown.
A closely related vein of research explores the impact of democracy on policy performance. Drawing on a study of IMF stabilization programs over a thirty-year period, her research shows that in comparison with authoritarian regimes, democracies have been no less likely to introduce or implement stabilization programs and no more likely to break down in response to their political costs. Analyzing policy responses to economic crisis, she further challenged the conventional wisdom about the impact of regime differences by providing evidence that democracies do not respond less effectively to economic crisis than authoritarian regimes. In related research on the impact of elections on macroeconomic performance in Latin America, Remmer provided evidence that competitive elections have enhanced rather than undermined the capacity of political leaders to address macroeconomic problems. Her analysis suggests that the relationship between democracy and economic performance is more effectively captured by a “political capital” model than by its more traditional political business cycle alternative.
Subnational politics in Argentina
Remmer's co-authored 2000 study offers evidence that interactions between party competition and the structure of the public sector shape fiscal performance at the subnational level and thereby condition the capacity for national economic adjustment. As the Argentine experience concretely demonstrates, in political systems characterized by federalism and decentralized government spending even relatively successful national adjustment efforts may be undermined by contradictions between local and national policy.