About

Carew Boulding is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined the department as an assistant professor in 2007 after receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She holds a B.A. from the University of Washington. Her current research examines the role of non-governmental organizations in local politics within developing democracies, with a focus on quantitative evidence from the municipal level in Bolivia. Her work includes exploring the relationship between NGOs, political participation, and social movements, as well as questions of political change. Additionally, she is interested in the politics of foreign aid and how foreign aid is used to promote democracy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Development economics
• Economics
• Law
• Political economy
• Economic growth
• Public administration
• Mathematics
• Social psychology
• Socioeconomics
• Public relations
• Medicine
• Geography
• Environmental health
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Voice and inequality poverty and political participation in Latin American democracies

  · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  "How do poor people in Latin America participate in politics? What explains the variation in the patterns of voting, protesting, and contacting government for the region's poorest citizens? Why are participation gaps larger in some countries than in others? This book offers the first large scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America, focusing on patterns of participation among the poorest citizens in each country, and comparing those patterns to those of individuals with more resources. Far from being politically inert, under certain conditions the poorest citizens in Latin America can act and speak for themselves with an intensity that far exceeds their modest socioeconomic resources. We argue that key institutions of democracy, namely civil society, political parties, and competitive elections, have an enormous impact on whether or not poor people turn out to vote, protest, and contact government officials. When voluntary organizations thrive in poor communities and when political parties focus their mobilization efforts on poor individuals, they respond with high levels of political activism. Poor people's activism also benefits from strong parties, robust electoral competition and well-functioning democratic institutions. Where electoral competition is robust and where the power of incumbents is constrained, we see higher levels of participation by poor individuals and more political equality. Precisely because the individual resource constraints that poor people face are daunting obstacles to political activism, our explanation focuses on those features of democratic politics that create opportunities for participation that have the strongest effect on poor people's political behavior." (Verlagsinformation)

• The Voice Referendum Compared: Comparative Attitudes Toward Indigenous Political Issues and Peoples

  Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Strength in Small Numbers: Indigenous Political Participation in Latin America

  Comparative Political Studies · 2025-05-27 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How do Indigenous peoples across Latin America participate in politics and what explains it? More than 500 Indigenous groups have experienced repression and attempts at erasure. Still, Indigenous communities persist and are politically active. We argue that structural and institutional factors within democracy do not fully explain Indigenous political engagement: they miss important dynamics within communities, where activism is often locally focused, rooted in community organizations, and focused on high-salience issues. Using the AmericasBarometer survey (17 countries, 2004–2019) we show that Indigenous people vote at equal levels to other citizens, and protest, contact government, join parties, campaign, and discuss politics more than non-Indigenous people. Variation in voting can be partially explained by Indigenous population size, but Indigenous people tend to participate at high levels in local and non-voting political activities regardless of population size. Associational participation is one mechanism that helps shape other diverse forms of Indigenous political action.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Public Opinion on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum: Racism, Hostility, and Divided Support

  Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Decentralization, State Capacity, and Inequality

  2025-03-13

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract On 10 March 2020, the Bolivian government identified the country’s first COVID-19 cases. The national government responded swiftly and sent the country into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns on 22 March 2020. Low state capacity and low government legitimacy stymied the national government’s response. The national government devolved authority to the country’s decentralized subnational authorities: some followed national directives, most selectively complied, and some resisted. This chapter analyses original daily data on COVID-19 cases, deaths, movements, and policies at the subnational level from Bolivia’s nine departments. The data span a year from 10 March 2020 to 10 March 2021. It finds that some departments had much higher cases and deaths per 100,000 residents than others. The initial descriptive data suggest that local containment policies and proximity to Brazil explain some variation in cases and deaths, but surprisingly, local state and health capacity does not clearly account for the variation.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Racism, Resentment and the Challenges of Democracy for Indigenous Peoples

  Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the world · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Author Correction: Non-pharmaceutical interventions to combat COVID-19 in the Americas described through daily sub-national data

  Scientific Data · 2023-10-31

  erratumOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Race, Resentment, and Ideology Shape Attitudes About Native American Inherent Rights and Policy Issues

  Political Research Quarterly · 2023-06-03 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  What shapes attitudes about Native American policy issues and inherent rights? Race and ethnicity are important in shaping US public opinion, but Native Americans have been almost entirely excluded from this research. We use data from an original survey and focus groups collected from the Reclaiming Native Truth project to examine the factors that shape attitudes toward Native American inherent rights and broader race conscious policy issues. We find high levels of support overall, but several factors influence lower levels of support. Many people have very low factual knowledge about Native American issues and rely heavily on partisan shortcuts in forming opinions, especially for policy issues. Overall, attitudes about inherent rights are less consistent as many people have very little knowledge about them. People of color tend to be more supportive than white people and white people tend to rely more on partisan shortcuts. Specifically, conservative whites are the least supportive across most issues. We also explore the effect of Native American resentment, finding there are people who hold overtly hostile views of Native Americans and are unsupportive of their rights and policies. Our findings contribute to growing literature on Indigenous resentment, settler colonialism and public attitudes toward Indigenous peoples.

  PublisherDOI

• Non-pharmaceutical interventions to combat COVID-19 in the Americas described through daily sub-national data

  Scientific Data · 2023-10-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  This dataset covers national and subnational non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the Americas. Prior to the development of a vaccine, NPI were governments' primary tools to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Variation in subnational responses to COVID-19 is high and is salient for health outcomes. This dataset captures governments' dynamic, varied NPI to combat COVID-19 for 80% of Latin America's population from each country's first case through December 2021. These daily data encompass all national and subnational units in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. The dataset includes individual and aggregate indices of nine NPI: school closures, work suspensions, public event cancellations, public transport suspensions, information campaigns, local travel restrictions, international travel controls, stay-at-home orders, and restrictions on the size of gatherings. We also collected data on mask mandates as a separate indicator. Local country-teams drew from multiple data sources, resulting in high-quality, reliable data. The dataset thus allows for consistent, meaningful comparisons of NPI within and across countries during the pandemic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Learning from Latin America: Coordinating Policy Responses across National and Subnational Levels to Combat COVID-19

  COVID · 2023-09-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  We provide policy lessons for governments across Latin America by drawing on an original dataset of daily national and subnational non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic for eight Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Our analysis offers lessons for health system decision-making at various levels of government and highlights the impact of subnational policy implementation for responding to health crises. However, subnational responses cannot replace coordinated national policy; governments should emphasize the vertical integration of evidence-based policy from national to local levels while tailoring local policies to local conditions as they evolve. Horizontal policy integration across sectors and jurisdictions will also improve coordination at each level of government. The Latin American experiences with policy and politics during the COVID-19 pandemic project glocal health policy recommendations that connect global considerations with local needs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claudio A. Holzner

  University of Utah

  13 shared

• Jami Nelson-Núñez

  12 shared

• Calla Hummel

  10 shared

• Felícia Marie Knaul

  University of Miami

  8 shared

• V. Ximena Velasco Guachalla

  University of Essex

  6 shared

• Michael Touchton

  University of Miami

  5 shared

• Héctor Arreola‐Ornelas

  Institute for Advanced Study

  5 shared

• Jeffrey Ayres

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  University of California, San Diego

• B.A.

  University of Washington