Jessala A. Grijalva is a political scientist working at the intersection of political institutions and political behavior, on race and American democracy. Her work asks why, after more than two centuries of democratic development, the United States has still not consolidated into a multiracial democracy. She locates the answer in power, in how democratic institutions distribute it across racial groups and in the gap between formal inclusion and genuinely shared power.

Her book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Exclusion, and the American Political Order, traces that question across American political development from the colonial period to the present. It argues that racial exclusion is not a contradiction within American democracy but a durable feature of it, and shows how institutions, including the courts, have repeatedly foreclosed the openings for a multiracial democracy. To capture what standard democracy indices miss, she built the Power-Sharing Index, a measure of how far democratic procedure falls short of real power-sharing across groups. Her related article, "Democracy for Whom? Herrenvolk Democracy and the American Founding," is forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics.

Her empirical work examines how race shapes political behavior within and across groups, including why Latinos, who share a racial identity, have split so sharply in their partisanship and support for Trump. Her current work turns from diagnosis to design, asking how the structure of elections and institutions shapes racial attitudes, and when it can build coalitions among groups with competing interests rather than deepen the divisions between them. As a Guinier Fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School, she runs experiments to test these questions directly, building evidence meant to guide reform, not only scholarship.

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.