research

articles

Limiting aggressive policing can reduce police and civilian violence
World Development, 2022: 105961, p. 1-18. [paper] [policy writing: Washington Post] [press: The World, Piauí, O Dia, ADPF Brazilian Supreme Court Proceedings]

Abstract Governments in the Americas rely on aggressive policing tactics to fight crime, despite scant evidence of impact. While recent studies depict militarized policing as a driver of violence, few governments have reconsidered their use of it. What impact does a restriction on aggressive policing have on violence, and why? This paper examines limits on police use of force and how they can be implemented to reduce both police and civilian violence. I argue that reforms that require internal, non-police oversight can be effective institutional constraints, minimizing police violence. In settings where organized crime is widespread, these limits can have spillover effects and further decrease civilian violence by (1) slowing the territorial diffusion of criminal conflict and (2) making conflict more predictable. I test these claims by examining an abrupt limit on police raids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I find that limiting raids – militarized police strikes targeting criminal gangs and communities under their control – led to a 66% decrease in police killings and a 58% decrease in homicides. The effects were concentrated in police precincts where rival criminal groups are in close proximity. Limiting raids did not lead police to be more violent during ordinary patrolling duties, and did not affect property crimes. The implication is that restraining police use of force in high-violence settings may save lives and be no worse than hard-on-crime strategies.


How do Covid-19 stay-at-home restrictions affect crime? Evidence from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
EconomiA, 2022: 147-163. (with Ana Paula Pellegrino). [paper] [policy writing: Nexo]

Abstract How do changes in mobility impact crime? Using police precinct-level daily crime statistics and shootings data from the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we estimate that extortion, theft, and robberies decrease by at least 41.6% following COVID-19 mandated stay-at-home orders and changes in mobility in March 2020. Conversely, we find no change in violent crimes, despite fewer people being on the streets. To address the relationship between crime and mobility, we use cellphone data and split the precincts into subgroups by pre-Covid-19-related restrictions mobility quintiles. We estimate a similar average decrease in extortion regardless of a precinct’s previous activity level, but find that the decrease in theft and robberies is substantially higher for the more mobile precincts while it disappears for the least mobile precincts. Using daily cellphone mobility data aggregated at the police precinct level, we find that changes in mobility while the stay-at-home order is in place only have a meaningful effect on robberies, which increase in likelihood when a precinct’s mobility ranking is higher than the previous day. Together, these results suggest that the stay-at-home order and associated decline in mobility strongly affected extortion and property crimes while not interfering with the dynamics of violent crime. These findings support the hypothesis that violent and property crime follow different dynamics, particularly where there is a bigger impact of organized criminal groups.


working papers

How criminal governance undermines elections [paper] [press: Pindograma, Piauí] Invited to Revise and Resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science

  • Recipient of the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award, APSA 2022
  • Recipient of the Best Paper Award from the Conflict Processes Section, APSA 2022
  • Recipient of the Elinor and Vincent Ostrom Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper and Presentation, Public Choice Society 2022
Abstract How does criminal governance affect elections? Existing accounts explore the consequences of criminal involvement in politics, but have not thoroughly examined how such groups exert their influence. I argue that criminal groups undermine elections through two mechanisms: (1) gatekeeping prevents rival candidates from accessing voters and (2) corralling influences voter choice. I use a natural experiment that leverages exogenous variation in voter assignment to voting booths and a novel dataset on criminal governance to test my theory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I show that gatekeeping restricts the candidate pool while corralling yields more votes for the local leading candidate. Together, these mechanisms decrease electoral competition. I illustrate the logic underpinning the mechanisms using qualitative data based on interviews and voter complaints. These findings bring together the literatures on clientelism and criminal governance by demonstrating that criminal groups leverage the power they derive from governing to sway elections.


Criminal revenue, civic returns: how illicit taxation boosts electoral participation UNU-WIDER working paper series. Submitted. [paper]

  • Recipient of the Best Paper Award from the Subnational Politics and Society Section, LASA 2020
  • Previously titled “Criminal capital and voter mobilization”
Abstract How does criminal group taxation affect participation in elections? I argue that criminal groups that tax public service provision use it as a technology of governance, which gives them a comparative advantage in voter mobilization. I predict that higher levels of criminal taxes on services ultimately lead to higher levels of voter participation, and contrast the service provision mechanism with other mechanisms related to coercive taxation and bottom-up reactions to being taxed. I test this argument in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where there is significant variation in taxation by drug trafficking gangs and by vigilante groups across the city’s favelas (informal settlements). To measure criminal taxation, I machine-coded text summaries of 1.45 million anonymous calls for help, and construct favela-year-level indices of criminal a) protection taxes and b) taxes on services. My empirical strategy leverages exogenous variation in favela resident presence at the ballot box to estimate the effect of exposure to criminal taxation on voting. I find that criminal taxes on services are strongly associated with higher levels of voter participation, but taxes on protection have the opposite effect. Consistent with my proposed mechanism, I find that taxes on service provision enable criminal groups to be more effective brokers, increasing participation.


Under the radar: estimating underreporting of gender-based violence to the police (with Isabella Montini) [paper] [policy brief]

Abstract Gender-based violence (GBV) is chronically underreported to law enforcement. Existing research emphasizes individual-level factors, but overlooks how broader police behavior shapes reporting. We argue that police violence has a dual effect by (1) discouraging reporting GBV to the police, while (2) shifting reporting towards third-party channels, when available. We link police records with anonymous call logs to an independent hotline to estimate the relationship between police violence and GBV reporting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our analyses demonstrate that exposure to police violence is associated with a relative decline in reporting to the police vis-a-vis the hotline. We then estimate the causal effect of an exogenous decrease in access to the anonymous hotline. GBV reports to the hotline fell by 45%, but fewer than half of these estimated callers filed a police report instead. The areas where women were least likely to call the police in the absence of the hotline were those with high police violence. Together these findings demonstrate that police violence incentivizes women to report to alternative channels or, in their absence, to stay silent.


Venue-based sampling: a practical tool to sample hard-to-reach populations in political science [poster]

Abstract Despite an increasing reliance on survey data, finding and sampling understudied populations remains a serious obstacle in political science research. This is particularly true for studies where we lack a high-quality sampling frame, such as conflict or rural settings, or informal areas in the developing world. This paper offers suggestions for how to find and interview these hard-to-reach groups outside of their homes, using a technique called venue-based sampling. I argue that venue-based sampling is underleveraged in political science, not just as a tool to find people, but also as a technique to improve response quality and, under certain conditions, better protect respondent safety. This paper explains the tradeoffs of using venue-based sampling to find people, to elicit truthful answers, and to conduct a safer survey. This paper illustrates these suggestions with evidence from an in-person survey conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which used a particular type of venue-based sampling -- worksite sampling -- to interview bus drivers and fare collectors about criminal governance in their neighborhoods.


book project

Machine gun politics: why politicians cooperate with organized crime

13% of Latin Americans live under criminal governance. Across the region, criminal groups provide order and influence over minute details of civic life – even electoral politics. Taken together, these residents represent a formidable voting bloc, and could single-handedly sway legislative and executive elections. Criminal groups’ influence over voter behavior drives three questions underpinning my research for this book:

  • How does living under criminal control affect their vote choice?
  • Relatedly, how do politicians evaluate risks when approaching these voters and their criminal governors?
  • Who benefits, electorally, when criminal groups govern?
Short description There is a strong consensus that criminal groups can influence elections. However, much of the literature focuses on criminal groups' incentives to engage with politics, leaving voters' and candidates' decisions unexplored. To understand how criminal governance affects voters' and candidates' choices during electoral campaigns, this book explores candidate-criminal electoral interactions and their consequences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Electoral cooperation is a common yet underexplored interaction between candidates and criminal groups. That candidates would strike collusive deals with organized crime could be puzzling. Partnering with criminal groups could be toxic to a candidate's reputation, criminal groups are known perpetrators of political violence, and it is often illegal to associate with them. Existing scholarship reflects these risks, often depicting candidates as one of two extremes: (1) engaging with organized crime under duress, and having little agency (passive bribe-takers or victims), or (2) deeply embedded and politically aligned (often as criminal group members themselves). However, the reality is more nuanced.

I demonstrate that professional politicians often strike strategic deals with criminal groups, and there exists a spectrum of cooperative arrangements between "passive bribe taker" and "fellow gangster." In fact, candidates often strike mutually beneficial bargains with organized crime, leveraging criminal groups' local influence for *their* electoral gain. I argue that resolving this empirical puzzle requires an understanding of how candidates evaluate and minimize risk while on the campaign trail. Specifically, candidates minimize reputational, legal, and security risks by striking spot deals with criminal groups. When candidates are able to strike such deals, they solve the commitment problem and earn votes, while criminal groups earn a one-time payoff. The nature of the candidate-criminal group deal has downstream implications for voters: it determines how (if at all) criminal groups mobilize voters, and how accountable their elected officials are, both to the group and to the voters. The book has key implications for our understanding of not only the risk assessments candidates make, but also the ways criminal groups interact with voters and the broader implications of criminal governance on democratic participation and accountability.

The empirical evidence in this book integrates several original pieces of evidence, collected over twenty months of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro. This includes over seventy interviews with candidates for local office, community leaders, criminal group members, and voters; an in-person survey administered to more than 350 residents subject to criminal governance; and a telephone survey administered to more than 300 candidates for local office. I also collected information from administrative and NGO records to create an original large-N database linking voting records with criminal governance and politician accountability. To compile these sources, I generated original data, scraping public websites and using text processing tools to prepare the data for analysis. Each of these sources provides important insights into the role of criminal governance in electoral politics. I evaluate my theory using a multi-method strategy that includes multiple natural and survey experiments, observational analyses, and case study comparisons.

This project focuses on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for theoretical and empirical reasons. This setting has rich within-case variation in the types of collusive agreements (from long-term partnerships to arms-length deals) and types of criminal groups (from warring drug trafficking organizations to extortion rackets). The subnational variation allows me to hold the broader institutional setting constant to isolate the effect of deal-striking on electoral outcomes and eliminate alternative explanations.

My book speaks to broad debates within comparative politics. There is not yet a theory explaining how distributive politics operate amidst criminal governance, two critical modalities of politics in the developing world that have largely been examined separately. Existing theories of criminal politics focus on what criminal groups can gain from getting involved in elections and on explaining variation in criminal violence, while leaving candidates in a black box. I depart from these studies of criminal politics by focusing on what *politicians* can gain from colluding with criminal actors. Finally, this book has implications for broader debates about public security policy. To understand why governments have been largely unsuccessful at constraining criminal groups' power and have allowed violence to escalate, I argue that we must consider candidates' electoral incentives and their relationships with powerful criminal intermediaries.


in progress

Strategic cartography: how map-making enables or obstructs social inclusion (with Ana Paula Pellegrino)

Abstract The poor are often excluded from official maps. Developing countries, particularly their urban areas, have massive inequalities in the quality and comprehensiveness of official maps, affecting the unmapped’s access to downstream social services and resources. How does “putting people on the map” affect inequality? Can low-income maps and registries be used as policy tools to counteract the challenges of living in a low-income settlement?

This project argues that informal settlement registries are a policy tool that can reduce inequality in low-income areas. We substantiate these claims in a two-step nested analysis. First, we conduct a micro-level analysis of 1,074 neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that were “put on the map” at different points in time. This within-city analysis lets us hold external factors constant and compare development outcomes in different neighborhoods. The rollout of the informal settlement registry began in 1981 and is updated periodically, which also lets us estimate the cumulative effects of “being mapped” over time on inequality. Second, we conduct a meso-level analysis of 152 medium and large cities in Brazil, and the determinants of whether or not they have an informal settlement registry. We use this study to eliminate alternative explanations about the reasons for adoption of an informal settlement registry, and to show how municipal trajectories of poverty and inequality change post-adoption. These two empirical strategies consider variation at the individual, neighborhood, and municipal levels. They show how including informal settlements on the map can change the life trajectory of those living in poverty and be a powerful inequality-reduction tool – if incumbents choose to deploy it.


The electoral returns to bending campaign rules: evidence from Brazil (with Almila Basak)

What electoral behaviors do voters complain about? A new dataset on electoral malfeasance in Brazil [poster]

A call of duty? police force formation in Brazil (with Ana Paula Pellegrino, Joana Monteiro, and Michael Weintraub)