Professor
Ph.D, University of California, Los Angeles
Javier M. Rodriguez is a political scientist whose research sits at the intersection of political institutions, inequality, and population health, advancing a structural account of how governance, policy, and power shape life-course health trajectories and premature mortality. His work is closely associated with a political-epidemiological perspective that treats political arrangements as upstream determinants that organize exposure to risk, access to resources, and the accumulation of disadvantage over time. A core theoretical contribution of his scholarship is the articulation of selective survival mechanisms, through which differential mortality across socioeconomic strata alters the composition of surviving populations, with downstream consequences for observed health gradients, political participation and electorates, and the reproduction of inequality. In this framework, premature mortality functions as an outcome of political and economic conditions and as a mechanism that stabilizes those conditions by selectively removing the most disadvantaged from social and political processes.
Substantively, Rodriguez’s research examines how political institutions, partisan configurations, and policy environments are linked to variation in early-life health, morbidity, and mortality. His work connects macro-political arrangements to biosocial processes, drawing on concepts such as allostatic load and weathering to theorize how chronic exposure to structurally-induced stress translates political and economic conditions into embodied health deterioration across the life course. By linking institutional variation to physiological wear, early mortality, and selective survival, his scholarship bridges population health science with political and policy analysis to explain how inequality becomes biologically embedded and persistently reproduced.
Methodologically, Rodriguez has strong interests in advanced statistical and causal inference methods for political and policy analysis, including longitudinal modeling, quasi-experimental designs, and counterfactual approaches. He is also engaged with program evaluation methodologies aimed at assessing the distributional and health consequences of public policies. Across his work, his scientific profile is defined by an effort to integrate political theory, rigorous quantitative methods, and population health frameworks to explain how inequality and disparities are generated, maintained, and intergenerationally transmitted through political processes.
Rodriguez received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed postdoctoral training in epidemiology at the University of Michigan.