Beatriz Magaloni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013) and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development. In 2010 she founded the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) within the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There she pursues a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods, and criminal violence. Her research has also concentrated on the politics of authoritarian regimes, democratization, and the dynamics of protest.

Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Magaloni also won the American Political Science Association's Gabriel Almond Award for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics in 1998.

Her second book Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez and under review at Cambridge University Press) studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent from of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses.

Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Magaloni was a Visiting Professor at UCLA and was a Professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM, Mexico, where she was born and grew up.