Working papers and publications
Research
Working Papers
Populism on Trial: Judicial Resilience in the Face of Populist Attacks
Using the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court's full docket from redemocratization to the present and a newspaper-based measure of executive attacks, this paper tests whether justices strategically adjust the timing and priority of the president's cases when the Court is under sustained populist attack.
Sacred Votes: How Evangelical Churches Influence Electoral Outcomes in Brazil
Using an original, hand-validated dataset of geolocated evangelical churches matched to precinct-level returns in Rio de Janeiro, and a difference-in-differences design exploiting the timing of new church openings after 2018, the paper shows that a newly opened church within 500 metres of a polling station raised Bolsonaro's 2022 vote share by about 0.6 points, drawn from both persuasion and the activation of would-be spoiled ballots.
The Dark Side of Anti-Corruption Politics: Populist Spillover Effects on Public Tolerance for Anti-Democratic Measures
A registered report proposing a 2×2 factorial survey experiment with 4,600 Brazilian respondents, testing whether mainstream anti-corruption rhetoric, stripped of populist framing, increases public tolerance for anti-democratic measures against courts.