He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and received a B.A. at Princeton University. Hidalgo's research focuses on political representation and electoral behavior in poor and middle-income democracies, as well as applied quantitative methods in the social sciences. His current substantive research interests include the political consequences of fraud-reducing electoral reforms, the role of money in politics, and the use of violence in elections. Hidalgo's methodological interests focus on the statistics of causal inference and the application of machine learning techniques to new forms of political data, such as images and text. He has extensive experience conducting qualitative and quantitative research in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Mexico, Georgia, and India.