Hello! My name is Andrés Schelp. I am an incoming Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV RI) in São Paulo, Brazil. I am currently a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Political Science at Northwestern University. I study international relations, with a focus on global performance indicators, foreign policy, international organizations, and public opinion.

My research examines how governments' performance is evaluated against standards set by states, international organizations, and NGOs, and the extent to which such evaluations shape elite decision-making and mass attitudes. My work focuses primarily on formal global assessments, such as Freedom House democracy ratings, and secondarily on informal cross-national comparisons that circulate in domestic and foreign policy debates. I trace how these evaluations inform the judgments of other global actors and, in turn, influence international cooperation and the allocation of foreign assistance. My research draws on original datasets on foreign assistance and country assessments, as well as quantitative text analysis, archival research, and survey experiments.

My dissertation paper, "Swaying or Being Swayed? Assessing the Evaluative Authority of the Freedom House Democracy Ratings and the U.S. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," received the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Foreign Policy section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) at the 2025 Annual Meeting. My work has been supported by the Political Science Department and the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University. 

Before coming to Northwestern, I worked as an academic assistant at the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI), a leading Latin American think tank advising on foreign policy and multilateral diplomacy. I received my B.A. in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina, 2016) and my M.A. in International Politics and Economics from the University of San Andrés (Argentina, 2021).