Leonardo R. Arriola is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on governance challenges in developing countries, including topics such as ethnic politics and electoral violence. His current work includes field experiments on the impact of civic education on voter perceptions of electoral integrity in Côte d’Ivoire and on the role of political endorsements in mobilizing multiethnic support for candidates in Kenya.

He is author of Multiethnic Coalitions in Africa: Business Financing of Opposition Election Campaigns (Cambridge University Press), which received the best book award in 2013 from the African Politics Conference Group, an organized section of the American Political Science Association and the African Studies Association. His research has also appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.

In becoming a BITSS Catalyst, he seeks to adopt the highest standards of research transparency in his own work and to help promote those standards among his colleagues and students.