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.

• “The Roots of Brazil’s Partisan Divide: Debating Structural Inequalities of Race, Class, and Gender” (with David Samuels, Larissa Beckman, and Fernando Mello, forthcoming in Latin American Politics and Society. replication materials available here).
  Brazilians are divided between supporters and opponents of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party – PT). To what extent do PT supporters (known as petistas) and opponents (antipetistas) hold coherent mirror-image worldviews? As elsewhere, the roots of partisan animosity in Brazil lie in voters’ divergent reactions to social and cultural change. Building on research on the consequences of left-party governance in Latin America, we argue that polarization in Brazil does not reflect demographic divides, nor are conservatives obsessed with religious values, corruption, or law and order issues. Instead, polarization primarily reflects a classic divide about whether government should foster social and economic equality or not. Specifically, petistas and antipetistas disagree about the relative importance of structural inequalities – of race, class, and gender – versus individual effort and merit versus in shaping social mobility. Petistas accept that inequalities limit individual opportunities, and support government efforts to level the playing field. Antipetistas deny that structural inequalities limit social mobility, and reject PT policies as unnecessary and counterproductive. To support our argument we combine qualitative and quantitative evidence from 22 focus groups and a nationally representative survey. Our findings confirm that the roots of Brazil’s partisan divide reflect clashing perspectives on the consequences of domestic social inclusion policies.
• “Do You Have an Appointment? How Executives Shape Electoral Careers in Brazil” (with Joaquim Meira and Timothy Power, conditionally accepted, replication materials available here)
  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 survey 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 entering electoral politics and winning elections. For experienced politicians, appointments both stimulate progressive ambition and contribute to electoral success. Elected executives are career-makers in presidential systems, boosting and launching careers through appointments.
• “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.
• “‘That Could Be Me’: Fear of Sending-Country Chaos Can Drive Immigration Attitudes” (with Fernando Mello, David Samuels, and Ignacio Jurado, working paper).
  Immigration is central to political contestation around the world. In the Global North, scholars explain attitudes toward immigrants through perceived economic, cultural, and security threats. We argue that immigration can shape politics in a different way. When migrants come from comparable countries in crisis, as is common with South-South migration, they can trigger `that could be me’ fears, which trigger fears about their own country’s potential political future — and about the possibility that they too might one day have to emigrate. We leverage the Venezuelan migration shock to test this argument, examining Latin American countries where migration levels and the strength of right-wing populist forces vary. Results from a preregistered survey experiment across six countries reveal that `that could be me’ fears provoke anxiety among voters about impending domestic political doom, even when immigration is low. Our findings show that immigration can be a powerful activator of political attitudes regardless of actual migration levels, particularly in the Global South, where `that could be me’ fears are potentially common.
• “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.
• “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.