Amy Catalinac is an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University. She is a Department Affiliate of Princeton's Department of Politics.

Catalinac is a comparative politics scholar with interests in electoral systems, distributive politics, and the politics of contemporary Japan. Her research has appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals.  She is the author of Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan: From Pork to Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Currently, Catalinac is interested in the relationships politicians form with groups of voters, in which votes are exchanged for goods. She has just finished a second book, Dominance Through Division: Group-Based Clientelism in Japan, on this subject.  Her work uses text-as-data, quasi-experiments, and qualitative analysis.

Prior to coming to NYU, Catalinac was a Research Fellow at Australian National University.  She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University.  Her undergraduate education took place in her native New Zealand.  She has studied at the University of Tokyo and has spent several years living and studying in Japan.

Catalinac is a co-founder and organizer of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS), and hosts the Frontiers in Empirical Research on East Asia  conference annually at NYU.