Graduate student Jaime Lindh studies the relationships between local governments and business communities in his native country of Chile.
Jaime Lindh is passionate about understanding the causes of inequitable government policies and finding policy solutions to increase governmental effectiveness. Currently in his fourth year of the political science doctoral program, Lindh studies the relationships between local governments and business communities in his native country of Chile.
Lindh’s inquiry is shaped by his work doing research at Chilean think tanks, where he examined fiscal decentralization and political institutions. “In Chile, things work relatively well in terms of the government at the national level,” he said. “I’m interested in understanding how business leaders engage with local governments and the negative or positive consequences of their involvement in terms of development and policymaking.”
Lindh notes that there is a high quality of life in the capital city of Santiago and surrounding communities, but that the quality of life decreases significantly in peripheral areas. “Many people don’t have the capacity to move to the metropolitan area,” he said. He hopes that his research will facilitate change for those residents.
He was drawn to Carolina because of the political science department’s commitment to theoretically informed and empirically rigorous research. “I appreciate how the department lets me approach a research question by going into the field and speaking with people and triangulating between different actors in the field,” he said. “They help me to build a theory, create and state a hypothesis, and test those hypotheses empirically with data.”
An expert in data analysis, Lindh has taught a master’s level course in the subject and has served as a teaching assistant for “Essential Mathematics and Statistics” and “Intro to Comparative Politics.”
“We spent a whole semester with my cohort and faculty discussing topics such as how to design a syllabus and classroom strategy to improve the teaching practice,” he said.
Lindh says teaching is rewarding. “The students are super engaged with the program and very motivated to learn,” he said.
A multi-year recipient of the Thomas M. Uhlman Graduate Fund in Political Science, Lindh has also received support from the Whit Ayres Fund for Graduate Student Support in the Department of Political Science and the Director’s Fund for Excellence in Latin American Studies.
“The private donor support has been super consequential and allowed me to understand better the questions that I have been working on,” he said. “The funding has allowed me to do field research in Chile and present and share our research at UNC-Chapel Hill and at conferences.”
Lindh believes that graduate students contribute to Carolina not only through their research and teaching, but by serving as ambassadors for the University. “Whether we go into the private sector or academia, the research and work that we do will have been formed by where we earned our Ph.D.,” he said.
By Michele Lynn, College of Arts and Sciences
This story is part of a package of stories on graduate students that will be published in the spring 2026 issue of Carolina Arts & Sciences magazine.