Dr. Gabriel Ondetti Research Group

Gabriel Ondetti

I’m currently the Clif and Gail Smart Professor of Political Science and Director of the Master of International Affairs program at Missouri State University. My research focuses mainly on the politics of taxation and land reform in Latin America. I’ve also taken a strong interest in the dynamics of social protest.

Most of my research in recent years has been devoted to understanding why some countries in Latin America have larger governments, fiscally-speaking, than others. My book, Property Threats and the Politics of Anti-Statism: The Historical Roots of Contemporary Tax Systems in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2021. It seeks to explain the surprisingly large differences in the extent of taxation among Latin American countries, with a focus on  Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Property Threats and the Politics of Anti-Statism won the best book prize of the Economics and Politics Section of the Latin American Studies Association and has been positively reviewed in Journal of Latin American Studies and Perspectives on Politics. I have also published a number of other works on this topic, including a chapter in Gustavo Flores-Macías' edited volume The Political Economy of Taxation in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2019). A spinoff from this project, called "Property Threats, Antistatism, and Business Organization in Latin America," will be published in the journal World Politics in January 2023.

I have also been working intermittently on issues of land reform and social movements. My first book, Land, Protest and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil, was published by Penn State University Press in 2008. More recent publications in these areas include an article on the social function of property principle in Brazil, which came out in Land Use Policy in 2016, and an article (co-authored with Indira Palacios-Valladares) on role of student protest in the reforms of the Nueva Mayoría government in Chile, which was published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research in 2019. I am also Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics. I obtained my PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2002.

Curriculum Vitae