Amy Catalinac is an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University.  She is a Visiting Research Scholar in Princeton's Department of Politics.

Catalinac is a scholar of electoral systems, party politics, distributive politics, and the politics of contemporary Japan.  Her work on the effects of electoral systems on politicians’ policy priorities, ideological positions, and decisions about the allocation of central government resources has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals.  She is also the author of Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan: From Pork to Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Catalinac's work is inspired by substantively-important questions in Japanese politics.  Currently, she is completing a solo-authored book manuscript called Dominance Through Division: Group-Based Clientelism in Japan.  Catalinac uses text-as-data approaches, 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).