Rachel Beatty Riedl

Rachel Beatty Riedl is the Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Center on Global Democracy in the Brooks School of Public Policy, and a Professor in the Brooks School and Department of Government at Cornell University. Her research expertise is on democracy and authoritarianism globally, and particularly across Africa. She focuses on questions of regime transition, participation, institutions, political parties, religion, and local governance.

She recently led the USAID’s Democracy, Rights and Governance learning agenda “Opening Democratic Spaces” research report, and the 2025 special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences on “Democratic Backsliding: How It Happens and How It Can Be Countered”. Riedl is also a member of the Open Society University Network’s Forum on Democracy and Development. Her publications include Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Party Systems in Africa (CUP 2014) and From Pews to Politics (CUP 2019).

She has been a visiting fellow at the Yale Program on Democracy, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She previously served as the John S. Knight Professor and Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell.

She is a full member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as Chair of the Democracy and Autocracy section of the American Political Science Association. Riedl is a member of the Editorial Committee of World Politics, and co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series Politics of Development. Riedl served as the President of the Scientific Committee of the Institute of Advanced Studies (France), and co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa, featuring scholarly analysis about life and politics on the African continent.