Welcome to my site!

I'm Santiago, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I'm also part of the Executive Committee of the Sustainable Social Policy and Welfare States Research Hub and a Faculty Affiliate of the Data Science Institute.

My research focuses on the political economy of governance systems — particularly how bureaucratic structures, decentralisation processes, and subnational politics shape the management of natural resources in contexts of fragmentation, politicisation, and inequality. I'm currently working on projects on bureaucratic patronage, intermunicipal collaboration, flood risk management, and deforestation in the tropics.

While my work centres on Latin America, I'm broadly interested in Global South countries and South–North comparisons. Beyond substantive research, I have a strong interest in political methodology — combining computational and quantitative methods, especially social network analysis, text-as-data, and causal inference.

I received my PhD in Political Economy from King's College London, and previously held positions as a Guest Teacher in the LSE School of Public Policy, a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Political Economy at KCL, and an Instructor at the Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana.