Isabela Mares is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York City. Her research has covered a wide range of topics in comparative social policy and comparative political economy, including the development of social insurance institutions, the effects of wage bargaining institutions on economic outcomes and social policy reform in developing countries. Isabela Mares is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003) which has won the Gregory Luebbert Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in Comparative Politics. Her second book, Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006) has examined how the growth in the tax burden and labor market outsiders has affected the economic performance of wage bargaining institutions. A recent set of articles have examined the political factors that account for recent adoption of non-contributory social policies in Latin American countries, the renationalizations of social insurance and the consequences of weakness of fiscal capacity for the political coalitions supporting different social policies in developing countries.

Isabela Mares has recently completed a new book entitled From open secrets to secret ballots: Democratic electoral reforms and voter autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The book examines an under-explored dimension of the process of democratization, namely the adoption of electoral reforms that reduced opportunities for electoral intimidation and vote-buying. It explores the economic and political factors that affected the incentives of politicians to support the adoption of legislation that provided a better protection of electoral secrecy and the consequences of these reforms for the development of political parties. Professor Isabela Mares is currently working on a comparative extension of this project entitled Democratization after Democratization: How Europe ended electoral fraud. This project examines the sequencing of three types of electoral reforms that have reduced electoral fraud during the first wave of democratization and the cross-national variaton in the composition of political coalitions that have supported these electoral reforms.

The book provides a systematic evaluation of the role played by business in the development of the modern welfare state. When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers for various employment-related risks? What factors explain the variation in the social policy preferences of employers? What is the relative importance of business and labor-based organization in the negotiation of a new social policy? This book studies these critical questions, by examining the role played by German and French producers in eight social policy reforms spanning nearly a century of social policy development. The analysis demonstrates that major social policies were adopted by cross-class alliances comprising labor-based organizations and key sectors of the business community.