[1] She was educated at Dartmouth College, and, having majored in comparative literature, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1985.
[4] She then moved to the United Kingdom to study at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford.
She studied political behaviour at the University of Essex, graduating with a Master of Arts (MA) degree in 1994.
[7] In July 2013, she joined the University of Glasgow where she had been appointed to the Chair of Comparative Politics.
[2] In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), Scotland's national academy of science and letters.