Contemporary right-skewed wealth distributions produce similarly skewed pools of campaign resources, which means that increased pressures to spend on campaigns disproportionately benefit very wealthy candidates. The paper develops a theory explaining how those financing pressures translate into advantages for the very rich and identifies several conditions that determine how large those advantages become and at whose expense they accrue.
How does a major corruption scandal shape public support for democratic institutions? This study uses the unexpected timing of Brazil’s historic 2015 corruption revelations to estimate causal effects on system support.
This study asks whether legislators change their votes when informed about an interest group’s size, economic importance and sectoral reach. Using a combination of a field experiment that randomized messages from a pro‑reform business organization, a survey experiment with lobbyists, and in‑depth interviews with senior political actors, the article tests whether informational cues about group characteristics increase legislators’ support. The contribution is a mixed‑methods, realistic test of cue‑based informational lobbying in a Brazilian setting, triangulating experimental and qualitative evidence without overclaiming generalizability.
A common assumption in theories of electoral accountability is that voters learn about an incumbent's quality by observing public goods outcomes. Empirical findings are mixed: making outcomes more visible sometimes strengthens accountability, but often it does not. This work reconciles those heterogeneous findings by centering bureaucrats in the production of public goods. A simple formal model with three actors — a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat — shows that accountability relationships produce different empirical implications depending on the level of bureaucratic quality.
This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.
Equal turnout supports equal representation, but mandatory voting may shift who shows up.
Descriptive representation can strengthen democracy by making party organizations more inclusive. The central theory is that parties retain and promote incumbents according to gendered criteria, which creates disproportionate incentives for women to recruit party members. At the same time, gendered resource inequalities reduce women’s access to the patronage networks and resources typically used for recruitment. Faced with these constraints, women respond by recruiting more women—because it lowers recruitment costs, fits role expectations, and makes credit claiming easier.
This study asks why so few military regimes pursue nuclear weapons, arguing that domestic priorities within militaries and the need to manage internal political threats make such regimes more likely to invest in conventional forces. Using case evidence from Egypt, Brazil, and Pakistan, the author identifies two domestic sources shaping proliferation behavior: the military organization’s resource distribution preferences and regime survival concerns. The paper tests this argument with comparative case analysis and suggests domestic factors matter alongside external security conditions.
This study asks whether local state action—specifically women’s police stations (WPS)—shapes citizens’ attitudes toward gender-based violence. Using evidence from Brazil, the authors examine whether the existence and duration of WPS in a municipality are associated with men’s rejection of violence and support for bystander intervention, and assess alternative explanations for those associations.
Do Leftist local governments push informal workers into formal jobs, or ease enforcement and improve informal conditions? This study asks whether mayors from Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) increase enforcement against enterprises that hire noncontract, informal-sector workers or instead adopt forbearant policies. Using a close-election regression discontinuity design at the municipal level, the article examines how left-wing victories affect enforcement and the size and conditions of the informal sector.
Does higher-quality public service lead voters to reward politicians? This question is investigated using signals of municipal school quality in Brazil, a setting particularly favorable to electoral accountability.
Conditional cash transfer programmes are widespread, but the independent role of program conditionalities (attendance and enforcement) on education and health remains debated. This study uses municipal-level data from Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme to test whether monitoring of school attendance—separate from cash-transfer coverage—is associated with better educational outcomes.
This study assesses whether publics outside the US and UK show the same "democratic bias"—reluctance to endorse force against democracies—that Tomz and Weeks (2013) documented for British and American respondents. The focus is on two emerging powers: Brazil (a democracy) and China (a non-democracy).
Almost four decades after Argentina ceded regional primacy to Brazil, the transition unfolded peacefully and cooperatively — a puzzle for structural theories and for analogies drawn to a possible US–China transition.
Social media use has surged among citizens and politicians in Brazil, and platforms like Twitter became central arenas for debate and propaganda during the highly polarized 2014 legislative and presidential elections. This study asks whether the decision to 'follow' a profile on Twitter can be used to estimate politicians' ideological positions and whether that approach can expose variation within a fragmented legislative body such as the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.
Compulsory voting is typically thought to close the turnout gap between rich and poor. Using Brazil—the largest country that enforces compulsory voting—evidence shows the opposite: compulsory voting increases turnout inequality by education (a proxy for socioeconomic status).
High rerunning rates among incumbents and the dominance of two major parties in the United States let U.S.-based studies avoid the selection problem of who chooses to run again. In countries where rerunning is uncommon or parties are fluid, applying U.S. methods can produce sample selection bias and produce misleading estimates of incumbency effects.
This paper examines the evolution of the institutional presidency — the cluster of agencies that directly support the chief executive — in Argentina and Brazil since redemocratization in the 1980s. The central question is what explains changes in the size of the institutional presidency and the types of agencies that compose it.
This article maps how Brazilian social sciences have adopted the topic of Internet and politics by systematically analyzing conference papers from 2000 to 2011.