Research

How much influence does incumbency have on the way parties nominate candidates? I address this question in the context of Argentina, examining how political parties decide on candidate nomination methods for National Deputies. I argue that holding the governorship creates an imbalanced distribution of resources within a party, leading party factions to lean toward consensus in candidate selection and reducing the likelihood of choosing a primary election. Conversely, when a party lacks the governorship, its provincial party leader may have a weaker influence in deterring primary elections. I also theorize the various situations and resources governors can employ to discourage primary elections, including potential coattail effects, the option of seeking reelection, control over the primaries’ selectorate, and control of the electoral calendar. To test my expectations, I employ a regression discontinuity design, focusing on governors and those who finished as runners-up in lower chamber elections from 1985 to 2023. My findings reveal that governor incumbency decreases the probability of holding a primary election. I conduct further analyses by examining subgroups, considering the governor’s circumstances and the resources I previously theorized as factors influencing primary deterrence. I find that incumbency only deters primaries when the governor and National Deputies elections are concurrent, when the governor is not term-limited, and when they have control over the electorate and the electoral calendar.

Ungated version

Do female candidates give up running for office after losing more readily than their male counterparts? I address this question by employing a regression discontinuity between last winners and first losers in city council elections in Brazil. The results show that losing an election diminishes the chances of running again for both genders. However, the effect is large for women. I offer an explanation for this gender gap in rerunning by developing a model based on the distribution of campaign financial resources among candidates. I argue that female candidates receive fewer financial resources from donors and their political parties than male candidates. Consequently, to run for office, women often need to use more of their own money. This leads to a faster depletion of their personal financial resources and, ultimately, a greater likelihood of them dropping out of politics. The argument is supported by evidence on campaign financing for the same period. 

Ungated version

Runoff systems allow for a reversion of the first-round results: the most voted candidate in the first round may end up losing the election in the second round. But do voters take advantage of this opportunity? Or does winning the first round increase the probability of winning the second? We investigate this question with data from national elections since 1945, as well as subnational elections in Latin America. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that being the most voted candidate in the first round has a substantial effect on the probability of winning the second round in mayoral races -especially in Brazil-, but in presidential and gubernatorial elections the effect is negative, though not statistically significant at conventional levels. The effect is much stronger when the top-two placed candidates are ideologically close --and thus harder to distinguish for voters-- but weakens considerably and becomes insignificant when the election is polarized. We attribute these differences to the disparate informational environment prevailing in local vs. higher-level races.

Ungated version

Studies of how previous political experience affects a candidate’s electoral success have overlooked the experience that candidates get from running campaigns even if they lose. This article argues that experience running for office, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, could give candidates several benefits, such as expertise in running strong campaigns, a network of connections, and visibility among the electorate. As a result, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, should be positively correlated with electoral success. The article tests this expectation in Brazil using a database of candidates for seven types of elected offices between 1998 and 2018. It finds that candidates who ran for, but lost, elected offices are more likely to win when they run in future elections for the same and lower-ranked offices, compared to candidates with no experience running for office. Thus, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, is important for explaining electoral success in politics. 

Ungated version

Are women disproportionately more likely than men to have family ties in politics? We study this question in Latin America, where legacies have been historically common, and we focus specifically on legislatures, where women's representation has increased dramatically in many countries. We hypothesize that, counter to conventional wisdom, women should be no more likely than men to have ties to political families. However, this may vary across legislatures with and without gender quotas. Our empirical analysis uses data from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America survey. We find more gender similarities than differences in legislators’ patterns of family ties both today and over the past 20 years. We also find that women are more likely to have family ties than men in legislatures without gender quotas, whereas this difference disappears in legislatures with quotas.

Ungated version

Given the scarcity of women in hierarchical positions in academic institutions, it is worth asking whether a gender gap in publications precedes this issue. We examine the gender gap in publications in eight of the most important political science journals in Argentina. We reviewed 974 peer-reviewed articles from 144 volumes published between 2011 and 2021, focusing on three dimensions: gender gaps in authorship, co-authorship patterns, and subfield affinities. Our findings suggest that while there is a gender gap in authorship in political science journals, it is not as significant as the gap documented in similar studies conducted in other countries. Furthermore, we found no evidence that the gender gap is due to co-authorship patterns. Finally, in terms of subfield affinities, our results suggest that male and female political scientists in Argentina have different affinities for topics within the field, and that journals that emphasize topics favored by men have a larger gender gap.

This paper evaluates the students’ reactions to an experiential learning (EL) exercise, the Craft Beer League (CBL), designed to enhance student engagement and problem-solving skills in an analytics course. By integrating gamification elements and real-world data into the curriculum, the CBL aims to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, fostering critical thinking, collaboration, and communication among students. Implemented across two different academic institutions, this study assesses the exercise's effectiveness in improving engagement and perceived analytical skills through a survey of participants. The results of the survey indicate that the competitive nature of the exercise increased engagement and sparked curiosity among participants to try out different analytical approaches in an effort to improve their standing in the competition. The findings suggest that the CBL can be a valuable educational tool that is widely applicable to various student populations.

Winter Storm Uri led to power outages in many Texas households in February 2021, unveiling crucial deficits in the state's electricity grid. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to analyze how individuals' differential experiences with power outages affect their willingness to pay (WTP) for policies aimed at increasing the reliability of the supply of electricity. We find that those who experienced longer outages are less willing to pay for reliable energy than individuals who experienced shorter outages and those who did not have an outage during the Winter storm. Our results remain robust to a battery of sensitivity checks. We further explore a mechanism that could explain the differences in WTP for reliable power: the perception of the public authority and the power companies' inability to address the deficits of the Texas power grid.

 The margin of victory (MOV) is one of the most important and well-established metrics in political science that quantifies the closeness of electoral contests. Despite its intuitive nature in first-past-the-post (FPTP)---half the vote-share difference between the winner and the runner-up, studying the MOV gets challenging under ranked-choice voting (RCV), where voters can vote by ranking multiple candidates and determine the majority winner via a series of candidate elimination and vote transfer. This paper discusses conceptual and computational challenges in studying the MOV in RCV. Utilizing works in computer science, we provide a generalized definition of the MOV as the minimum number of votes that need to be modified to change the election winner. Moreover, we also provide the first large-scale computation of the MOV under RCV, leveraging the cast vote records from 444 RCV elections and an efficient optimization algorithm that explores the vast space of counterfactual electoral results. Finally, to illustrate the utility of our results, we study electoral competitiveness in RCV elections from 2007 to 2022, finding that elections are more competitive under RCV than under FPTP. We also discuss and illustrate the advantages of using RCV margins in the sharp regression-discontinuity design. Our publicly available results allow social scientists to study various aspects of RCV.

Successful coordination around a Duvergerian equilibrium requires accurate and consistent information about parties' expected electoral support. In practice, such information is rarely available at the local level, where polls are prohibitively expensive, making voters' coordination difficult. In this paper we leverage Argentina's Open, Mandatory, and Simultaneous Primary Elections as a large-scale survey of voter preferences. Using data from 135 municipalities in the province of Buenos Aires during 2011-2023, we show that a narrower margin between the top-two placed parties in the primary increases turnout and the proportion of positive votes, but decreases electoral fragmentation in the general election. Additionally, while the first-placed party in the primary does not benefit from a ``bandwagon'' effect, the second-placed one is substantially more likely to win the election than the third-placed one. In line with theoretical predictions, these phenomena are more pronounced (a) in concurrent elections; (b) in smaller municipalities; and (c) when the second-placed party is closer to the first-placed one.