Ricardo Velázquez Leyer holds a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Bath and an MA in Public Policy and Management from the University of Manchester. He is Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico City (IBERO). He is a member of the National Researchers’ System of Mexico. He is also a member of the editorial teams of the journals Social Policy and Society and Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. In the past he has been a visiting scholar at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the University of Bath.
His research areas are public policy analysis and comparative social policy, with a focus on Latin America. He specialises in the study of the development, outputs, and outcomes of social policies, with a historical-institutional perspective. He has published his research on this region in high-impact journals, book chapters and project reports, on topics like the configuration of welfare regimes, the politics of social policy expansion, the effects of social investment and labour market policies on poverty, and the successes and failures of healthcare reforms, among others. His most recent articles discuss the dismantling of the anti-poverty programme of conditional cash transfers in Mexico, published in the journal Policy & Politics; the degree of universalisation of healthcare provision in Chile and Mexico, published in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice; and the institutionalisation of measures to fight the Covid-19 pandemic around the world, published in Social Policy and Society. At IBERO, Ricardo teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Public Policy, Social Policy, Public Administration and Social Research Methods, and has supervised PhD thesis on topics like labour market informality in Bolivia and Chile, welfare services for elderly people in Cuba and Mexico, and the adoption of international conventions on migration and domestic work in Mexico.
Among other projects in which he is currently involved, at LAC Ricardo is working on a book on Public Policy Theories, that reviews and analyses the relevant issues of policy analysis for political theory and practice in Spanish-speaking countries.