Lisa Baldez is an Americanpolitical scientist and scholar ofLatin American Studies. She is a professor of Government atDartmouth College, where she was also Cheheyl Professor and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College from 2015 until 2018. She studies the relationship betweenpolitical institutions andgender equality, and has written about theUnited NationsConvention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, women's protests inChile,gender quota laws, and theEqual Rights Amendment.

Baldez attendedPrinceton University, where she earned a BA in Latin American studies in 1986.^[1] She then completed an MA in political science at theUniversity of California, San Diego in 1992, followed by a political science Ph.D. there in 1997. Her dissertation received an honorable mention for the 1998 Best Dissertation Prize from the Women and Politics Section of theAmerican Political Science Association.^[1]

In spring of 1997, Baldez worked as an adjunct professor atRochester Institute of Technology,University of Rochester, and in 1997 she joined the political science faculty atWashington University in St. Louis.^[1] From 1999 to 2002, Baldez was a Harbison Faculty Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.^[1][2] In Spring 2003, she was a visiting professor atHarvard University.^[1] In 2003, she became a professor at Dartmouth College.^[1]

In 2002, Baldez published the bookWhy Women Protest: Women's Movements in Chile, in which she studies what causes women to protest, and in what situations they make their gender identity salient as part of their protests.^[3] Baldez focuses on the struggle forwomen's suffrage in Chile,^[4] as well as on two major episodes of protests by women in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s: the protests againstSalvador Allende and againstAugusto Pinochet.^[5] In both of these cases women's political mobilization was a major factor in undermining the legitimacy of a regime, even though these movements were in many ways ideologically opposite.^[3] Baldez theorizes that women form major social movements when partisan realignment gives them the opportunity to do so, and they are able to frame their exclusion from public life as a reason to protest apart from partisan differences.^[6] She tests this idea usingarchival material andresearch interviews with activists who were involved in the two movements.^[7]

Baldez published a second book,Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women's Rights, in 2014. InDefying Convention, Baldez studies why the United States was one of very few countries that had not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which pledges to put an end to war and establishes gender equality.^[8] Baldez examines this decision in the context of the historical development of a globalnorm of women's rights, and attributes American non-ratification partly to division among women's groups domestically on how best to achieve gender equality, and partly to United States obstructionism at the UN towards any initiatives by theSoviet Union and its allies.^[9] She also studies how the interpretation of the text of the treaty evolved in the years after its drafting, so that the effective meaning of ratifying the treaty might be understood to have changed over time, which complicates the study of why the United States did not ratify the text in different periods.^[9] Baldez structures her discussion using historicalprocess tracing, and compares the possibility of America ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women to its ratification of theInternational Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination nearly 30 years after that convention's initial drafting.^[10]Defying Convention won the 2015Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association, which is given each year for "the best book published on women and politics" in the previous year.^[11] It also won the 2015 Best Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association.^[12]

In addition to her articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and her chapters in edited books, Baldez was also an editor of the 2008 volumePolitical Women and American Democracy: Critical Perspectives on Women and Politics Research, together withChristina Wolbrecht and Karen Beckwith.^[1] From 2015 until 2018, Baldez was Cheheyl Professor and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College.^[13]

Baldez was a founding co-editor of the journalPolitics & Gender in 2004.^[1] Her work has been cited, or she has been quoted, in news outlets likeVox,^[14]KQED-FM,^[15] andBloomberg News.^[16]

• Why Women Protest: Women's Movements in Chile (2002)
• "Elected Bodies: The Gender Quota Law for Legislative Candidates in Mexico",Legislative Studies Quarterly (2011)
• Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women's Rights (2014)

• Victoria Schuck Award, American Political Science Association (2015)
• Best Book Award, Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association (2015)

Scholia has anauthor profile forLisa Baldez.

• 21st-century American women academics
• American women political scientists
• 21st-century American political scientists
• 21st-century American women writers
• 20th-century American women writers
• Living people
• Princeton University alumni
• University of California, San Diego alumni
• Rochester Institute of Technology faculty
• University of Rochester faculty
• Washington University in St. Louis faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• Dartmouth College faculty
• Washington University in St. Louis fellows

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