Byron Villacis

Byron Villacis teaches classes on research methods, demography, sociology of statistics, sociology of expertise, and sociology of corruption. His research focuses on three areas: first, he explores how societies shape and are shaped by quantifications. Adopting a critical posture towards the effects of numbers in societies, he develops techniques to improve our understanding of the power and limitations of numbers, the social forces mobilizing them, and their circulation between public and private realms. Second, he studies the role of experts in societies, how they achieve their status and how power relations shape expertise. Villacis aims to propose mechanisms to pursue a more democratic construction and circulation of expertise. He has explored the role of experts in the fields of corruption, dollarization, statistics, and gender. Finally, he is interested in understanding how modern notions of anti-corruption are latently associated with austerity, inequality, and the compression of particular markets.

Villacis is working on his first book about the social life of numbers and their role in legitimizing anti-corruption policies. He argues that public numbers act as a répertoire that helps societies to make sense of reality. These numbers go through a life cycle mobilized by social forces surrounding them and creating defined styles of statistical reasoning. The investigation is the output of two years of a multi-method transnational fieldwork in Germany, the United States, Brazil, and Ecuador; in-depth interviews with high-level officials and elites; archival analysis; participant observation; geometrical data analysis; and the construction of an original prosopographical dataset of global anti-corruption experts.

Villacis has an active participation in spaces of public sociology and data activism. He uses the tools, methods, and concepts of social science to construct bridges to broader audiences in an accessible manner. This includes newspaper articles, blog posts, radio station visits, television appearances, Youtube, and the classroom. He co-founded the Latin American Observatory of Population Censuses (OLAC), which has produced, since 2016, more than 200 didactic pieces analyzing and evaluating the transparency of public statistics. He is also the head coordinator of the official oversight of the 2022 population census in Ecuador, officialized through the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS). He regularly contributes to newspapers such as El Universo, El Telégrafo and digital outlets such as Open Democracy, GK, and the Dollarization Observatory. In addition, he has been quoted and interviewed in outlets such as The Washington Post (USA), El Diario (España), Clarin (Argentina), France24 (France), Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Revista Vistazo (Ecuador), Revista Lideres (Ecuador), Semana (Colombia), among others.

He was the head of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses in Ecuador, where he led the 2010 Population Census and administered more than 35 national official surveys - including the National Survey of Employment and Unemployment, the National Survey of Violence Against Woman, and the National Survey of Live Conditions. He also founded and directed private research companies and has been a consultant for international organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank and corporations such as Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. He is a Senior Fellow of the Corruption in the Global South Research Consortium and a Board Member of the Research Committee of Sociology of Population of the International Sociological Association (ISA).