Jeffrey W. Paller, Researcher in the Department of Government at Uppsala University and an Associate Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco.

Jeffrey uses ethnography, focus groups, and surveys to examine the political conditions under which democratic activity and accountability develop in poor urban communities, specifically in Africa. He is an Associate at GLD and co-leading the GLD project “Emerging Cities”, a Swedish Research Council-funded research environment that examines political change and local governance in secondary cities (2023-27). He is also the PI for the “Building Sustainable Neighborhoods in African Cities” project (Formas 2024-26) and a Co-I on the “Political Transformation in African Cities (PACE)” project supported by the Research Council of Norway (2021-24). Jeffrey discusses his research on this episode of SCAS Talks.

Jeffrey's research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation,  University of Wisconsin, and USF. He was a Research Associate at the Center for Democratic Development in Ghana in 2012, and received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of political science in 2014. During the academic year 2014-15, he was a Visiting Lecturer of Politics at Bates College. In 2016, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, working with the Center for Sustainable Urban Development. Jeffrey curates the weekly news bulletin This Week in Africa.