Current Research

Below is a non-exhaustive list of my work in progress. Titles, analyses, and conclusions are still tentative. Please contact me for additional details.

• “Polarization and Perceptions of Status Gain and Loss: The Case of Brazil” (with Fernando Mello and David Samuels, working paper). Findings discussed in Piauí (Feb 2024) and in this episode of UOL TV’s Análise da Notícia.
• “Same Outcome, Different Pathway: A Comparative Perspective on Polarization in Brazil” (with David Samuels, Larissa Beckman, and Fernando Mello, under review).
• “‘That Could Be Me’: Fear of Sending-Country Chaos Can Drive Immigration Attitudes” (with Fernando Mello, David Samuels, and Ignacio Jurado, working paper).
• “Exogenous Shocks and Misattribution of Responsibility for Economic Performance: Results From Survey Experiments” (with Daniela Campello, under review). An earlier version received the prize for best paper presented in the 2017 annual REPAL conference.
  Economic voting enhances representation only if voters can correctly assign responsibility for economic performance, which requires distinguishing between domestic policy effects and external economic conditions. Existing research suggests that voters achieve this by benchmarking their economy’s performance against comparable nations. However, most empirical support for this claim comes from European democracies, where political, economic, and media integration facilitate cross-border comparisons. In contrast, studies in developing countries show that individuals often disregard external influences and overestimate the role of domestic policymaking, suggesting they do not benchmark across borders. This study examines individual-level barriers to benchmarking through surveys and survey experiments in Brazil. Our findings reveal that even when provided with relevant information, few respondents engage in comparative assessments and even fewer do so when updating assessments about real political leaders. We conclude that widespread benchmarking of economic performance across borders in developing countries is highly unlikely.
• “Do You Have an Appointment? How Executives Shape Electoral Careers in Brazil” (with Joaquim Meira and Timothy Power, under review)
  How do political appointments affect electoral careers? Despite a large literature on political ambition and career trajectories around the globe, insufficient attention has been paid to the role of appointments made by elected executives to cabinet positions in presidential systems. We study this phenomenon in the context of Brazil, a three-tiered federation with multiple career paths. We first poll members of Congress to create a hierarchy of perceived political value for various public offices. Then, using original data on politicians’ career trajectories and matching methods to create comparable groups of appointed and non-appointed politicians, we test hypotheses on their subsequent ambition and electoral success. Compared to similar politicians who were not appointed to executive office, appointees have higher probabilities of seeking and winning higher office and lower probability of seeking lower-ranked offices. Elected executives are also career-makers in presidential systems, boosting and launching careers through appointments.
• “Carnaval and electoral behavior under Brazil’s military dictatorship” (with  Caio Gonçalves and Fabio Caldieraro, work in progress). Findings discussed in this episode of UOL TV’s A Hora (minute 41:40).
  Does associational life under dictatorship serve as a “school of democracy” or a “transmission belt” for state co-optation? This paper examines this paradox by analyzing the political role of escolas de samba during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). We argue that these communal organizations created “free spaces” where subaltern groups developed “hidden transcripts” of identity to coordinate opposition under censorship. Using an original dataset of georeferenced precinct-level results from the 1974 and 1978 elections and LLM-based classification of 1,874 samba-enredos, we employ matching strategies to estimate the impact of escola presence on anti-regime voting. We find that while escolas de samba increased opposition support by 3.2 percentage points on average, this effect reached a massive 10.3 percentage points for escolas with a history of combining a non-officialist institutional legacy with narratives of Black resistance. These results suggest that social capital is not politically neutral; its impact depends on the interaction between historical path dependence and cultural signaling.