He received his B.A. in Economics from American University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research areas include political economy and social movements. Leiva’s essays on Latin American development, on the role of the state, and labor movement have appeared in journals such as Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Perspectives, and New Political Economy, among others. He is the author of Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Democracy and Poverty in Chile: The Limits of Electoral Democracy (Westview Press, 1994), and of a co-edited volume Democracy in Chile: The Legacy of September 11, 1973 (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) which won the MACLAS’ Arthur P. Whitaker Best Book Prize.