Robert Kaufman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has been a Research Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs in l967-68 and again in l975-76. In l980-8l he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Research Fellow at the Collegium Budapest in 1997. In 2000 and 2015 he was a Visiting Scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford University. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a member of the Executive Council and as Treasurer of the American Political Science Association, and President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association from 2015-2017.

He has written widely on authoritarianism and democratic transitions, and on the political economy of economic reform. His current research focuses on backsliding in democratic regimes in Latin America, other developing and post-communist countries, and the United States. Most recently, he is the co-author, with Stephan Haggard, of Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World, from Cambridge University Press (2021), and Dictators and Democrats: Elites, Masses, and Regime Change (2016) from Princeton University Press, co-winner of the Best Book Prize awarded by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.