María Victoria Murillo is a professor of political science and international and public affairs. Her research on distributive politics in Latin America has covered labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, and economic policy more generally. Her work on political parties analyzes both their coalitional and policy implications as well as their linkages with voters in new democracies. Her empirical work is based on a variety of methods ranging from quantitative analysis of datasets built for all Latin American countries to qualitative field work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela, and survey and experiments in Argentina and Chile.

She is also the co-editor of Argentine Democracy: the Politics of Institutional Weakness (Pennsylvania State University Press 2005), Carreras Magisteriales, Desempeño Educativo y Sindicatos de Maestros en América Latina (Flacso-Argentina, 2003), and Discutir Alfonsín (Siglo XXI-Argentina, 2010). Her work has also appeared in World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, the Annual Review of Political Science, and many Latin American academic journals. Murillo has taught at Yale University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, a Fulbright scholar, and a Russell Sage Visiting Fellow. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Buenos Aires and her master's degree and PhD from Harvard University.