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. Our findings support a theoretical framework in which elections reinforce, rather than constrain, criminal governance in democratic settings.

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.

Presidential impeachment has traditionally been seen as a clear manifestation of accountability. Recently, however, the impeachment of some presidents has led to public backlash, with some being regarded as “legislative coups.” 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 highlighting the importance of affective and ideological polarization for presidential impeachment. We theorize impeachment as a multi-hurdle process and focus on examining the determinants of overcoming two primary hurdles: a lower house vote (the first hurdle) and removal from office (the second hurdle). Using 44 successful and failed impeachments, we employ crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine this issue. The analysis supports our hypotheses, highlighting that many cases of impeachment cannot be explained unless polarization is taken into account. In particular, our analysis illustrates three types of impeachment: polarized impeachment, scandalized impeachment, and mobilized impeachment. The results withstand a wide range of robustness tests, including sensitivity ranges, consistency thresholds, fit-oriented robustness, and cluster analysis. Given the rise of affective polarization worldwide, presidential impeachment may be increasingly weaponized by polarized elites.

State presence is often considered weakest in a country’s periphery. In contrast, we argue that small towns on the periphery have more influence on the distribution of centrally-allocated public works than is commonly understood. Infrastructure projects yield greater political returns in smaller municipalities because they are more visible, less costly, and credit-attribution is simpler. Combining extensive fieldwork with a novel dataset of over 60,000 project-specific amendments added to the Brazilian budget by national deputies (2015–2023), we show that smaller municipalities receive more projects and funds per capita than larger ones. Deputies also gain greater vote returns per Real spent in smaller towns. Yet this higher spending often takes the form of simpler, lower-quality projects, allowing critical infrastructure gaps in water, health, education, and transportation to persist. Thus, while more infrastructure flows to the periphery, it is of lower quality, reinforcing the paradox of visible state presence but limited state capacity.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is chronically underreported to law enforcement. Existing research emphasizes individual-level factors, but overlooks how broader police behavior shapes reporting. We argue that police violence has a dual effect by (1) discouraging reporting GBV to the police, while (2) shifting reporting towards third-party channels, when available. We link police records with anonymous call logs to an independent hotline to estimate the relationship between police violence and GBV reporting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our analyses demonstrate that exposure to police violence is associated with a relative decline in reporting to the police vis-à-vis the hotline. We then estimate the causal effect of an exogenous decrease in access to the anonymous hotline. GBV reports to the hotline fell by 45%, but fewer than half of these estimated callers filed a police report instead. The areas where women were least likely to call the police in the absence of the hotline were those with high police violence. Together, these findings demonstrate that police violence incentivizes women to report to alternative channels or, in their absence, to stay silent.

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.

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.