The dominant frameworks in American politics share an assumption: that liberal democracy is the baseline of the American project and racial exclusion is a deviation from that design. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if the system is working exactly as it was built to work? 

Dr. Jessala A. Grijalva is a political scientist whose research asks why multiracial democracy has proven so difficult to achieve and how those on the margins respond politically. One line of research reframes American political development through the concept of herrenvolk democracy, arguing that racial hierarchy is not a flaw in the democratic design but constitutive of it. Her book, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Immigration, and the American Political Order (under consideration at Princeton University Press), traces how immigration and citizenship law has defined the racial boundaries of the demos and enforced exclusion across four eras, from the founding through the contemporary struggle over multiracial democracy. A second line of research turns to the nation's largest marginalized electorate, Latinos, and investigates how people form political identities and make political choices within a system that was not built for them. 

Answering these questions has meant building new tools. Dr. Grijalva develops computational methods, including interpretable machine learning and novel measurement frameworks, to reveal what conventional approaches cannot. Her work bridges unsupervised and supervised learning with democratic theory and political behavior, producing both new ways of seeing the system and new ways of understanding the people living inside it.

Background 

Born and raised in South Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Grijalva began her academic journey at Pima Community College. She transferred to the University of Arizona, graduating magna cum laude, before earning her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 and is currently on the academic job market.

Current Work & Recognition

Dr. Grijalva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she serves as Co-Principal Investigator of a $100,000 Democracy Initiative Catalyst Grant and is leading interdisciplinary research on multiracial democracy. She currently has three solo-authored articles under review at Politics, Groups, and Identities, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Political Psychology. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She has developed original courses on Latino leadership and applied leadership at Notre Dame, and mentors students through ICPSR's diversity initiative. Her recent co-authored work with Luis Fraga analyzing Latino support for Trump in 2024 appeared in APSA's Political Science Now post-election series.