Here is a list of my publications, working papers, and current projects:
Peer-Reviewed Publications
What Do We Know about Power Sharing after 50 Years?
With Mahmoud Farag, Hae Ran Jung, Juliette Bourdeau de Fontenay and Satveer Ladhar
The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 23 variables from 373 academic articles published between 1969 and 2018. The power-sharing literature, our analysis shows, has witnessed a boom in publications in the last two decades, more than the average publication rate in the social sciences. This review offers a synthesis of how power sharing is theorized, operationalized, and studied. We demonstrate that power-sharing has generally positive effects, regardless of institutional set-up, post-conflict transitional character, and world region. Furthermore, we highlight structural factors that are mostly associated with the success of power sharing. Finally, the review develops a research agenda to guide future scholarly work on power-sharing.
Government and Opposition Volume 58, Issue 4, October 2023, pp. 899 - 920.
Working Papers
When Elections Empower Crime: Political Protection and Milícia Expansion in Rio de Janeiro
With Bruno Pantaleão
Milícias are mafia-style organizations, often composed of current and former state agents, that have rapidly expanded in areas with limited state presence and weak legal oversight. In Rio de Janeiro, their territorial control is not maintained by coercion alone, but also through strategic political alliances. This paper theorizes and tests a mechanism linking milícia expansion to electoral politics: milícias deliver concentrated electoral support to specific politicians, who in return shield their operations by influencing bureaucratic appointments and law enforcement priorities. Using original geospatial and electoral data, we show that milícia entry into a new area increases electoral concentration and disproportionately benefits milícia-aligned candidates in adjacent territories. We further demonstrate that this electoral capital is converted into political power through key bureaucratic appointments that facilitate further expansion and institutional impunity. Overall, these findings support a theoretical framework in which elections reinforce, rather than constrain, criminal governance in democratic settings.
R&R at Latin American Politics and Society
Pork Politics and Municipality Size: Evidence from Brazil
With Alison E. Post
In most low- and middle-income countries, municipalities do not collect sufficient tax revenue to fund critical water, health, education, and transportation infrastructure. As a result, most depend on discretionary transfers from higher tiers of government to meet infrastructure needs. What types of municipalities are better positioned to secure these funds? Scholarship on distributive politics emphasizes that funds typically flow to jurisdictions with core voters (controlled by aligned politicians) or those with significant numbers of swing voters. In this project, we emphasize an alternative predictor: municipality population size. Mayors and municipal councilors in smaller municipalities have less own-source revenue available for infrastructure projects, so they have stronger incentives to lobby for funds. Such infrastructure projects are also more likely to generate political returns for local politicians and their benefactors at higher tiers of government in smaller cities because the projects are more visible and less costly, and both credit-claiming and credit-attribution efforts are, therefore, more effective. We test this argument using an original dataset of ~ 65,000 project-specific amendments national deputies can add to Brazilian budget legislation for 2015-2023. We find an inverse relationship between municipal population size, per capita spending, and per capita project counts, a relationship that is particularly strong for infrastructure projects. Deputies are also more likely to steer projects to mayors (rather than NGOs) in smaller municipalities, particularly to mayors of the same political party. Meanwhile, budget amendment spending yields deputies greater vote increases per Real spent in smaller municipalities. Yet quantity is not the same as quality: deputies award simpler, cheaper projects to smaller municipalities out of concerns regarding state capacity, potentially contributing to infrastructural disparities.
To Impeach Or Not To Impeach: Elite Polarization, Mass Mobilization, and Corruption Scandals
With Mahmoud Farag and Philipp Schemm
Presidential impeachment is one of the greatest manifestations of accountability. In examining the determinants of impeachment, studies have highlighted the role played by corruption scandals, mass mobilization, and the absence of a legislative shield. We contribute to this literature by underscoring the importance of elite polarization for presidential impeachment. The paper does not discredit current explanations but illustrates how elite affective and ideological polarization shapes impeachment in conjunction with the current explanations. Using a sample of successful and failed impeachments, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine this issue. The analysis supports our hypotheses, highlighting how elite polarization matters for impeachment (or the lack thereof). The results stand a wide range of robustness tests, including sensitivity ranges, consistency thresholds, fit-oriented robustness, and cluster analysis. Given the rise of affective polarization across the globe, presidential impeachment might be increasingly weaponized by polarized elites.
R&R at the European Political Science Review
Electoral Rules and The Provision of Public versus Targeted Goods: Evidence from Mayoral Elections in Brazil
This study examines how a single variation in electoral rules influences politicians’ investment in public and targeted goods. Using a unique threshold policy introduced in Brazil in 1988, I employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of a two-round election on the distribution and quality of targeted and public goods. The results show that single-round elections are associated with greater efforts to allocate targeted goods relative to single-round elections, but I only find marginal increases in the quality of public goods delivery by mayors. Counter to previous studies, it is unclear whether two-round elections are associated with greater effort to deliver public goods. The findings suggest that previous work has focused on too narrow a set of indicators to assess the effect of this particular type of electoral rule, overlooking its impact on targeted goods provision.
Under Review
Research in Progress
Under the Rader: Estimating Underreporting of Gender-Based Violence to the Police
With Jessie Trudeau
Gender-based violence (GBV) remains underreported to law enforcement, obscuring the true prevalence of violence against women and limiting institutional responses. While existing research often attributes underreporting to personal concerns, the role of broader institutional factors is less understood. Where and why are victims more likely to report gender-based violence to the police? Under what conditions can third-party reporting channels mitigate the underreporting of GBV to the police? We study gender-based violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, analyzing 3 million calls for help to an independent, anonymous tip line between 2008 and 2023. We geolocate and merge these calls with police records and precinct-level socioeconomic data to analyze divergent temporal and spatial reporting patterns, contrasting the frequency of gender-based violence reported to 1) the police or 2) the anonymous helpline.
Our analysis offers three main insights. First, we estimate GBV underreporting to the police. We use a novel bounding exercise that contrasts police and anonymous reporting data, which highlights the specific spatial and criminal characteristics that make types of GBV particularly vulnerable to underreporting. Second, we identify key predictors of GBV. We conduct a large-N analysis of granular predictors of violence against women over time, including socioeconomic conditions, general levels of violence, and other crimes that frequently co-occur with GBV, such as drug trafficking and corruption of minors. Third, we further identify interactive effects that exacerbate GBV. We focus on areas with high levels of police violence, violent crime, and criminal governance, shedding light on how GBV is reported in the most vulnerable areas, where state presence and governance are most contested or inadequate. We substantiate this with qualitative evidence about women in marginalized regions (like Brazil’s favelas) who often rely on social services rather than law enforcement to seek help. This paper’s contribution is twofold: first, we systematically document not only the existence of GBV reporting gaps to the police but also that these gaps are wider in marginalized communities. Then, we show the observable risk factors that could be used by policymakers to mitigate these gaps.
The Paradox of Protection: Patterns of Gender-Based Violence in Gang-Controlled Areas
With Johanna Reyes Ortega
This project assesses the impact of specialized judicial institutions on women’s claim-making behavior across two major metropolitan areas in Latin America: the states of Mexico and São Paulo, both marked by strong criminal group presence and uneven state provision. Using a survey experiment informed by extensive fieldwork, the research examines how women in these settings choose to report gendered crimes, whether to formal authorities (e.g., police), criminal organizations, or non-governmental organizations, in municipalities with varying levels of state presence and judicial specialization.