Jessala A. Grijalva is a political scientist whose work examines the behavioral and institutional foundations of multiracial democracy. Her research asks how democratic institutions distribute political power across racial groups, how racialized exclusion structures intergroup attitudes and political behavior, and what institutional designs would be required for multiracial democracy to become shared power rather than formal inclusion alone.
Grijalva’s scholarship centers on the tension between multiracial democracy and herrenvolk democracy. Her book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Exclusion, and the American Political Order, examines how the United States developed democratic institutions while preserving racialized boundaries of membership, representation, and power. The project argues that racial exclusion is not merely a contradiction within American democracy, but a durable feature of the American political order. Her related article, “Democracy for Whom? Herrenvolk Democracy and the American Founding,” is forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics.
A major contribution of Grijalva’s work is methodological: she develops tools for measuring racialized power and complex political behavior. Her Power-Sharing Index operationalizes the gap between institutional democracy and group-centered democratic power-sharing, making visible how democratic procedures can coexist with dominant-group power. Her earlier work on Latino acculturation used cluster analysis to measure identity and incorporation as multidimensional processes rather than linear movement toward assimilation. Across these projects, measurement is not separate from theory; it is how her work makes claims about race, power, and democracy empirically testable.
Her work on Latino political behavior examines Latino conservatism, support for Trump, intragroup heterogeneity, and the gender gap. This work asks why members of the same racialized group diverge politically under conditions where many theories of group politics expect cohesion. Using random forest models and SHAP interpretation, she identifies the attitudinal structures associated with Latino support for Trump across multiple election cycles and connects those patterns to broader questions about racial boundaries, political cross-pressures, and democratic conflict.
In Fall 2026, Grijalva will join Harvard Law School as a Guinier Fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute. There, she will extend her agenda to electoral reform and institutional design by building the behavioral evidence layer for power-sharing reform. This work examines how electoral systems shape perceived representation, racialized threat, political efficacy, democratic legitimacy, polarization, intergroup relations, and support for shared power. In this role, she will develop research tools for academic scholarship, Institute reports, advocacy strategy, remedy design, and litigation-related efforts.
Across these projects, Grijalva’s work asks what it would take for the United States to become a genuine multiracial democracy — not only formal inclusion, but organized around shared power, equal standing, and institutions capable of sustaining democratic life across racial groups.
Background
Born and raised on the South Side of Tucson, Arizona, Grijalva began her higher education at Pima Community College before transferring to the University of Arizona, where she earned a B.A. in Government and Public Policy, magna cum laude, and was one of two recipients of the Robie Gold Medal, awarded to graduating students recognized for integrity, notable achievement, and positive contributions to their families and communities. She later earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.