PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“Government Ideology and Support for Redistribution among the Wealthy” (with Daniel Rojas), accepted at Political Science Research and Methods.
“What Is To Be Done? How Radical Leftists Help to Solve the Problem of Personalist Party Building in Latin America” (with Jared Abbott), Comparative Political Studies, 2024, 57(10), pp. 1634–1667.
“Will the Revolution Be Televised? Party Organization, Media Activism, and the Communication Strategies of Left-Wing Governments in Latin America” Comparative Politics, 2023, 56(1), pp. 23-47.
PEER-REVIEWED BOOK CHAPTERS
“Economic Elites and Development with Equity in Bolivia and Ecuador” (with Eduardo Silva), in Jan Ickler and Rebeca Ramos, eds., Political Economy of Wealth and Elites in Latin America (New York: Routledge), 2025.
WORKING PAPERS
“The Party is Over: Policy Switch and Party Dismantling in Moreno’s Ecuador” [R&R].
This article explains the dramatic downfall of Alianza PAIS, the most electorally successful party in Ecuador’s recent history. It shows how, after his switch to a neoliberal policy agenda, President Moreno (2017-2021) dismantled his own party by starving it of the resources necessary to thrive. The paper marshals evidence from interviews, newspaper articles, and roll call votes to demonstrate how three conditions were causally important for this outcome to happen: the top-down structure of the party, the support Moreno received from the opposition, and the fact that Alianza PAIS represented a future threat to Moreno’s policy legacy. The paper contributes to the literature on party development by showing that party breakdown can be the intended consequence of party leadership's decisions and actions.
“The Durability of Pink Tide Era Interest Intermediation Regimes: Parties, Popular Sector Organizations, and the Legacies of their New Incorporation Projects” (with Eduardo Silva).
Over the last two decades much has been written about the Pink Tide, about its origins, its policy agendas, and its relations with societal actors. Now that this first wave of left-wing governments has ebbed and many of them have been replaced by conservative ones, we are in a better position to provide a longer-term assessment of their incorporation projects, their durability, and their legacy. In our analysis, we focus on the concept of interest intermediation regime (IIR) because it connects forms of articulating the competing and conflictual interests of diverse social groups to the state with the question of political stability and the role that such regimes play in democratic governance. We address two questions. First, what remains of the IIRs they implemented? Second, what explains variation in the durability of those IIRs in the face of conservative rollback? We argue that the strength of linkages between left parties and popular sector organizations influenced the resilience of IIRs. Whereas strong linkages facilitated the extra-electoral mobilization of popular sector organizations and increased the costs of rollback for right-wing governments, weak linkages failed to encourage popular sector mobilization in defense of existing channels of incorporation and made rollback more likely. We use the case studies of Bolivia and Ecuador to assess the validity our claims.
"Going Organic: The Effect of Strong Party-Movement Ties on Party Strength and Electoral Success" (with Jared Abbott).
Organic connections between political parties and social organizations produce a large number of benefits for the former. Organic connections provide organizational support to parties, strengthening party organization and increasing their chances of survival in the long run. Organic connections also keep party leaders accountable, enhancing policy responsiveness to the preferences of party bases and fostering internal party democracy. We learned about the existence of a positive relationship between organic connections and desirable party outcomes thanks to small-N research design and detailed case studies. The literature has then generally assumed that these findings apply more broadly. In this paper, we seek to build on the literature on party organic connections and test its findings in a large-N study. Using data from a variety of datasets – including V-Dem, PELA-USAL, and the Manifesto Project – we investigate whether organic connections with social organizations are associated with party longevity, party organizational strength, party responsiveness, and party internal democracy. We then use a difference-in-differences research design to test whether parties with organic connections to social movements help governing parties overcome exogenous economic shocks.
BOOK PROJECT
The Company You Keep: Centrists, Party Alliances, and Democratic Breakdown in Latin America and Southern Europe
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
"The Long Coup in Ecuador," NACLA Report on the Americas, November 18, 2019.
"Perché le proteste non sono tutte uguali: mobilitazione e lotta di classe in America Latina," Dinamo Press, December 18, 2019.