Cleo Anne A. Calimbahin is a Senior Research Fellow of the ANU Philippines Institute. She is a Professor of Political Science specializing in elections, corruption, and democracy studies in the Department of Political Science and Development Studies at De La Salle University-Manila. She completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Fulbright Fellow.

Among her publications are 'Mapping the Philippines' Defective Democracy with Julio Teehankee and  ‘Democratic Backsliding in the Philippines: Are Voters Becoming Illiberal?’ with Yuko Kasuya. She co-edited the book, Patronage Democracy in the Philippines: Clans, Clients and Competition in Local Elections. The book received the 2024 Outstanding Book Award in the Social Sciences from the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST).

Cleo was a Research Associate with RAND in Washington DC, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC), the Global South Scholar in Residence at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, and a Visiting Research Fellow for the Institute for Developing Economies (IDE-Jetro) in Japan. She is an Advisory Council member of Women in Southeast Asian Social Science and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Asian Politics and Policy.