I am a political scientist at Columbia University with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). I previously served as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, and as Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. I have also held visiting or temporary appointments at Nuffield College (University of Oxford), Princeton University, Yale University, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars (Washington, DC), and IUPERJ (Rio de Janeiro; now IESP-UERJ).

I am a specialist in Latin American politics, with research focusing on executive–legislative relations, political parties, voting behavior, and the political economy of public policy in Brazil and in comparative perspective. This website hosts information on my published and ongoing research, along with data and replication materials. I aim to keep it current and welcome suggestions, corrections, or requests for materials not available here.

In The Volatility Curse (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Daniela Campello and I examine how voters misattribute responsibility for economic outcomes—especially in countries dependent on commodity exports and foreign capital—and how this misattribution weakens electoral accountability. We show that this misattribution prevents voters from holding incumbents accountable through elections. The first paper in the project was published in The Journal of Politics in 2016, a second piece came out in the same journal in 2020, and other working papers are now circulating or under review (see below). Our research was mentioned in The Economist, featured in Folha de São Paulo, and discussed in several other media outlets in Brazil and abroad. We also published, in the April 2020 edition of Piauí magazine, an analysis of (then President) Bolsonaro’s political prospects that builds on some of the arguments that we make in the book. As of 2026 we are working on a long overdue paper that examines the individual level drivers of the macro-level attribution we identified in the book and slowly moving forward with research on the long-term political implications of economic volatility and on ways to mitigate it.

My first book “Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans” (with David Samuels) was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. We employed a mix of observational and experimental techniques to examine the determinants and consequences of party identification in Brazil. The main message of the book is that partisanship and antipartisanship developed in tandem in Brazil and have shaped voting behavior to a much greater extent than has been previously acknowledged. We are currently working with Fernando Mello on a series of extensions and updates of the arguments in the book. Recent findings from this project are included in a paper on stereotyping published in Latin American Politics and Society and in a working paper on status loss/gains that was also discussed in this article in Piauí magazine (Feb 2024).

​

Timothy Power and I coordinate the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, a three-decade effort to track and record the beliefs of Brazilian legislators. The 10^th wave of the BLS was fielded in during much of 2025. The data are currently being tabulated and initial versions of several academic papers were discussed in a workshop held in the University of Oxford in May 2026. This most recent wave of the survey was also recently featured in Folha de São Paulo and Canal UOL, and the data will be available to the public soon. The data set from waves 1–9 is available in the project’s repository.

I am also engaged in a long-term collaboration with Natalia Bueno in which we assesses the political feedback of the “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” housing program. The first papers out of this project, coauthored with Felipe Nunes were published in The Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. We are now looking into a possible campaign finance connection with Gabriel Caseiro, and we expect to work on a “thought piece” drawing together broader implications of the project.