Professor Benjamin Goldfrank, department chair of the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, was cited by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (a top-ten impact journal in the fields of Urban Studies and Planning and Development) and noted as "one of the most perceptive analysts of democratic innovation in Latin American cities."

Goldfrank was cited for his work, "Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America," which was published by the academic journal in 2009. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) invited all of its former editors – from the journal's inception in 1977 to 2017— to name "a small number of papers" of "particular significance" in the journal's history.

Over the span of 40 years IJURR published more than 1000 papers, the former editors of the high impact journal chose 24; Goldfrank's work, co-authored with Andrew Schrank, was one of the two dozen picked for distinction.

The journal writes:

Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America
Benjamin Goldfrank and Andrew Schrank (2009)

From the start IJURR was deeply committed to the analysis of innovative forms of participatory and deliberative democracy in urban areas. The rise of left municipal governments and ‘participatory budgeting’ in Latin America became a major concern in the 2000s. Marcus Melo played a particularly important role in developing IJURR's work on this, including through a symposium that he co-edited with Gianpaolo Baiocchi in September 2006. Benjamin Goldfrank has been one of the most perceptive analysts of democratic innovation in Latin American cities. In this 2009 article, he joined with Andrew Schrank, whose work has focused more on industrial policy and labour regulation, to write a path-breaking paper that examined 'municipal neoliberalism' (mostly in central America) as well as the better known cases of 'municipal socialism' (mostly in Brazil). Goldfrank and Schrank examined what led cities to each of these very different forms of municipal governance, and what are the consequences. IJURR has of course also published many critiques of neoliberal policy in cities across the world, but it has been rare that the empirical study of cases of neoliberal governance has been combined with the empirical study of cases of municipal socialism. This paper provided a comparative method that might usefully be replicated in studies of variation in urban governance elsewhere in the world. JS

The IJURR 40th Anniversary edition, "Celebrating 40 years of Critical Urban Research."