Ken Opalo is an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service. His research interests include legislative development, the politics of service provision under decentralized government, education reforms, and electoral politics in emerging democracies.
His current book projects explore the political economy of education policy in Tanzania since the early 1960s and state-building in Kenya since 1900.
Ken’s first book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the evolution of legislatures in emerging democracies, with a focus on explaining the observed variation in the institutionalization and strength of legislatures in African states. His work has been published in the Journal of Legislative Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Governance, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and the Journal of Democracy. Ken is a member of the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation and Development Evaluation (gui2de) and Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development.