Publications 

Books 

A burgeoning literature studies compulsory voting and its effects on turnout, but we know very little about how compulsory voting works in practice. In this Element, the authors fill this gap by providing an in-depth discussion of compulsory voting rules and their enforcement in Australia, Belgium, and Brazil. By analysing comparable public opinion data from these three countries, they shed light on citizens' attitudes toward compulsory voting. The Element examines citizens' perceptions, their knowledge of the system, and whether they support it. The authors connect this with information on citizens' reported turnout and vote choice to assess who is affected by mandatory voting and why. The work clarifies that there is no single system of compulsory voting. Each country has its own set of rules, and most voters are unaware of how they are enforced.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of public opinion in the democratic world. Built around chapters that highlight key explanatory frameworks used in understanding public opinion, the book presents a coherent study of the subject in a comparative perspective, emphasizing and interrogating immigration as a key issue of high concern to most mass publics in the democratic world.This edited volume will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in public opinion, political behaviour, voting behaviour, politics of the media, immigration, political communication, and, more generally, democracy and comparative politics.

The Michigan model, named after the institution where it was first articulated, has been used to explain voting behavior in North American and Western European democracies. In Latin American Elections, experts on Latin America join with experts on electoral studies to evaluate the model's applicability in this region. Analyzing data from the AmericasBarometer, a scientific public opinion survey carried out in 18 Latin American nations from 2008 to 2012, the authors find that, like democratic voters elsewhere, Latin Americans respond to long-term forces, such as social class, political party ties, and political ideology while also paying attention to short-term issues, such as the economy, crime, corruption. Of course, Latin Americans differ from other Americans, and among themselves. Voters who have experienced left-wing populism may favor government curbs on freedom of expression, for example, while voters enduring high levels of economic deprivation or instability tend to vote against the party in power. The authors thus conclude that, to a surprising extent, the Michigan model offers a powerful explanatory model for voting behavior in Latin America.

Abstract: This article examines how support for conspiracy theories is affected by political endorsement. By relying on the literature on partisan cues and the role of political identity (partisan or ideological) in shaping people's attitudes and behaviors, we argue that endorsement of conspiracy theories by political elites convergent (divergent) with one's political identity should increase (decrease) belief in said conspiracy theories. We rely on data collected from over 10,000 respondents in Brazil to evaluate this hypothesis by embedding a wording experiment in questions tapping support for conspiracy theories. We find that partisans of the Workers' Party, a well-established party with a strong base of supporters, are affected by political endorsements by showing greater (lower) support for conspiracy theories when endorsed by political elites convergent (divergent) with their political identity. Our findings suggest that political endorsements of conspiracy theories exert similar effects as endorsements of other political issues or public policies.

Abstract: Corruption scandals can be costly for elected officials seeking re-election. But what happens when the other candidate alternatives are also known to be corrupt? Do voters downplay the importance of corruption in their vote decision when corruption is widespread? Also, how does it affect their engagement with the electoral process? Are voters more likely to abstain or cast null or blank votes when presented with corrupt candidates? In this paper, we contribute to a flourishing literature that focuses on the importance of clean electoral alternatives to tackle these questions. We do so by adopting an innovative vignette experiment that we apply to a large sample of adult Brazilians where we manipulate the availability of candidate alternatives in a mock election. We find that as the availability of honest candidate alternatives decreases, the lower the electoral engagement and the importance given to corruption on vote choice.

We know a great deal about how individual and institutional factors combine to explain economic voting in well-established democracies, but much less is known about these dynamics in younger democracies and even less so in subnational contexts. Using survey and fiscal data from four federal Latin American countries and adopting a multilevel estimation strategy, we examine voters’ ability to blame and reward governors for the state of the economy (state and national levels) while simultaneously accounting for the states’ level of fiscal centralization and partisan dynamics between the two levels. We find that support for governors is weakly associated with the economy but more strongly so with presidential approval. More importantly, we find that fiscal centralization and partisan dynamics moderate the association between the economy, presidential approval, and support for governors. Little support is found, however, for the clarity of responsibility argument in multilevel governance in these Latin American countries.

Scandals have always been a highly salient problem in politics. In judging politicians for their misconduct, voters may arguably be biased – they may evaluate scandals based on individual motivations, such as partisanship and self-interested concerns. In this paper, we examine these two considerations in the case of two real-world corruption scandals involving a single incumbent government. In addition to testing for the effects of partisan motivations in authentic situations, we consider how scandals associated with policy goals interact with personal motivations, shaping the degree to which people penalize a scandalous government. Across two survey experiments that prime respondents about real-world corruption scandals, we manipulate question wording for some participants and measure their evaluations of a scandalous leader's performance. We find an effect for self-interested concerns when the benefits associated with the scandal are concentrated and tangible. Our findings suggest that voters hold public figures accountable for misbehaviour and that there are limits to partisan loyalties in political scandals.

The objective of this study is to identify the determining attitudinal, behavioral, and sociodemographic factors behind the vaccination decision of parents and guardians in Brazil regarding immunization of children against COVID-19. Our data is obtained from a national online survey of 1,872 parents or guardians of children between 5 and 11 years of age, conducted from May 16 to 25, 2022. Our results show that, in Brazil, the decision to vaccinate children against COVID-19 is better explained by attitudinal and behavioral factors than sociodemographic ones. More precisely, the choice to immunize children against COVID-19 is strongly associated with the parents or guardians' own COVID-19 vaccination status, their ambivalence regarding this decision, their political preferences, and media use. In particular, parents and guardians who did not vaccinate against SARSCov2 and who supported former president Jair Bolsonaro (the main anti-vaccine political leader in the country during the COVID-19 pandemic) were substantially less likely to vaccinate their children. Parents and guardians with greater exposure to the country’s major TV news program (Jornal Nacional/TV Globo), however, were more likely to do so. Other findings show that evangelicals - whose religious leaders strongly supported the former president -, young parents and guardians, and those from lower economic status were also less likely to vaccinate their children.

This article investigates the role of media behavior in the adherence of Brazilians to the three main non-pharmacological measures (NPIs) endorsed by global health organizations against COVID-19: the use of face masks, social distancing, and frequent handwashing. Following the outbreak of a pandemic when vaccines are not yet available, the adoption of these behaviors may be the only effective measure against the threats of a new disease. Grounded in social cognitive theory, we examine the behavioral determinants of adherence to these measures in Brazil, a middle-income country marked by significant economic and informational inequalities. Brazil, one of the countries most severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, was led by former President Jair Bolsonaro, who showed little regard for the use of face masks and encouraged large gatherings at political events. Our findings, based on an online survey administered to a sample of 2,771 individuals, indicate that media-related determinants such as knowledge about COVID-19, the use of social and traditional media, and belief in a conspiracy theory regarding the origin of the coronavirus play a significant role in explaining adherence to preventive measures. In contrast, other determinants such as political preferences, sociodemographic characteristics, and environmental factors play a secondary role.

The Canadian Senate was originally designed to act as an independent check on the House of Commons but over time, rampant and increasing partisanship rendered the Senate illegitimate in the eyes of the public. In 2014, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau tried to reverse these trends by expelling all Liberal Senators from his party in hopes of reducing partisanship and restoring the Senate to its original, independent function. To what extent did this decision reduce partisanship? Using a difference-in-differences design, we analyse almost 7000 interventions over an 11-year period to find that partisanship remains strong in the Senate, with ex-Liberal Senators more likely to raise women's issues compared to Conservative Senators post-2014. This trend seems consistent with the Liberal Party's strong and the Conservative Party's weak feminist agenda after the Liberals formed the government in 2015.

We study the impact of compulsory voting in Brazil, where voting is mandatory from age 18 to 70 and voluntary for those aged 16, 17 and 70+. Using a survey sample of 8008 respondents, we document voter confusion about how the age criterion applies. Some people falsely believe that what matters is one's age in an election year rather than on Election Day. Next, we perform a regression discontinuity (RD) analysis of compulsory voting among young voters with register-based data from six Brazilian elections (2008–2018). We find that the effect of compulsory voting is seriously underestimated if we focus solely on the discontinuities prescribed by the law. Our findings carry important implications for studies adopting the RD design where knowledge of the cutoff is expected of the units of interest (like those about compulsory voting) and confirm that compulsory voting is a strong institutional arrangement that promotes greater electoral participation.

This article examines the relative efficiency of the Iowa model—a commonly used forecasting model in France—and the proxy model—a variant of the Iowa model—to predict the vote for all left-wing candidates in the 1965–2017 French presidential elections. We show that the proxy model may perform better than the Iowa model in predicting the vote for left-wing candidates in these elections. In additional tests, we used the proxy model to forecast the vote for left-wing candidates in the 2022 presidential election. The proxy model predicted that Macron would pass to the second round and that he would win the election if competing with a more extreme right-wing candidate such as Le Pen or Zemmour. However, the forecast suggested that a Macron victory was less certain against a more moderate right-wing candidate such as Pécresse.