Publications
Forthcoming. Who Governs? Regime Change and the Power of Business, Military and Political Elites in 20th Century Spain (with Álvaro La Parra-Pérez). In Boix, Carles and Pablo Beramendi (eds.), Twisted Modernization. Cambridge University Press.
This chapter studies intra-elite arrangements between politicians, top firms’ business and bank executives, and the high ranks of the military in Spain between 1920 and 2000. It explores shifts in the level of cohesiveness and fragmentation between these elite groups during periods of regime change. Leveraging original data from 38,366 elite members and their connections, we find evidence that ruling coalitions mutate both across and within regimes. Elites tend to be more cohesive (better connected) during non-democratic periods than democratic ones. Furthermore, business elites participate more in politics under autocracy than in democracy. Finally, military officers are more embedded in political and economic spheres via their direct participation during non-democratic periods.
2024. Antipolitical Class Bias in Corruption Sentencing (with Luiz Doria-Vilaça and Marco Morucci). American Journal of Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12885.
Are corruption trials that involve the highest ranks in the public sphere and large private companies biased against some groups? Existing research predominantly focuses on corruption prosecutions of politicians, leaving unresolved the extent to which judges apply differential treatment when convicting and sentencing the political class compared to other defendants, including those in the private sector. To address this gap, we investigate judicial bias within Brazil's famous “Operação Lava Jato,” the largest corruption investigation carried out in history. Leveraging an original database that traces the trajectory of the universe of the 3154 cases of Lava Jato, we show that judges' sentencing decisions were not governed by a partisan logic. Instead, judges were more inclined to impose longer prison times and higher fines to elected politicians when compared to all other defendants, particularly those from the private sector. We interpret these findings as evidence of antipolitical class bias.
2022. When Clients Vote for Brokers: How Elections Improve Public Goods Provision in Urban Slums. World Development, Vol. 158.
Does electoral democracy improve public goods provision for the poor? This paper considers whether and how the introduction of elections to choose slum-level representatives affects the provision of basic public goods and services in these communities. To address this question I take advantage of an unexpected interruption in the judicial process that introduced elections in urban slums in Argentina. Drawing on an original household survey, an expert survey, and insights from in-depth interviews, I show that the introduction of elections enhanced public goods and services provision only in slums with high organizational density. In such a context, existing organizational structures and citizens' organizational experience facilitated individuals’ endeavors to demand and monitor the provision of public goods and the emergence of new leaders other than partisan brokers that skewed political competition towards the provision of public goods. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between elections, participation and public goods provision in urban informal settlements and have implications for development practitioners: Under the right conditions, the democratic selection of slum intermediaries vis-à-vis the state can substantially improve the livelihood of these communities.
2021. Economic Elites and the Constitutional Design of Sharing Political Power (with Jan Vogler). Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2022, pp. 25-52.
What explains the emergence and persistence of institutions aimed at preventing any ruling group from using the state apparatus to advance particularistic interests? To answer this recurring question, a burgeoning literature examines the establishment of power-sharing institutions in societies divided by ethnic or religious cleavages. Going beyond existing scholarly work focused on these specific settings, we argue that political power-sharing institutions can also be the result of common disputes within the economic elite. We propose that these institutions are likely to emerge and persist where competition between elite factions with dissimilar economic interests is balanced. To address possible endogeneity between elite configurations and institutions, we leverage natural resource diversity as an instrument for elite configurations. We show that, where geological resources are more diverse, competition between similarly powerful economic groups is more likely to emerge, leading ultimately to the establishment of power-sharing mechanisms that subsequently allow elite groups to protect their diverging economic interests.
2020. Moving Markets? Government Bond Investors and Microeconomic Policy Changes (with Layna Mosley and Erik Wibbels). Economics & Politics, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 197-249.
Do sovereign bond markets react systematically to microeconomic policy reforms? Some observers suggest that investors are very attentive to supply-side policies such as those related to labor markets, corporate taxation and product standards. They argue that, along with macroeconomic outcomes and broad financial market conditions, such reforms affect sovereign bond premiums, for developed as well as emerging economies. In contrast, we predict few systematic effects of supply-side policy reforms on sovereign bond market outcomes. Our theory draws on a standard three-equation model of the economy, widely accepted among economic and finance professionals. That model makes few clear predictions regarding the anticipated effects of microeconomic policy changes; as a result, we expect that such reforms will not generate systematic market reactions. Our analyses, based on daily data from 37 countries from 2004 to 2012, indeed reveal little evidence of a systematic bond market reaction to the 47 most significant reforms to corporate taxation and labor market regulation. These results call into question the notion that "bond market vigilantes" play a central role in compelling governments to enact specific microeconomic policy changes.
Working Papers
Landowners, Capitalists and Bankers: The Political Economy of Business Influence
- Recipient of the Early Career Award for the Best Paper Delivered by a Graduate Student in the 2018 MPSA Conference
What explains economic elites’ choice of mechanisms to protect their capital? Existing approaches to economic elites’ influence and their role in distributive struggles explicitly or implicitly assume that elites identify with a single economic activity. Some of these theories consider this group’s interests as cohesive, whereas others emphasize factoral, sectoral, industry or firm cleavages. In contrast, I make the point that to explain why members of the economic elite choose different political strategies to advance their policy interests it is necessary to disentangle the diversification structure of their asset portfolio. I argue that investors’ asset portfolio structure accounts for variation in their motivations to influence different types of policy outcomes and, therefore, to invest in different political strategies. I test my argument in Argentina between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries using original individual-level data gathered from previously untapped historical archives. I show that diversified economic elites are more likely to participate directly in politics occupying elected and appointed positions in government, participating in encompassing employer organizations, and to embed themselves into elitist social circles, whereas those who are specialized in a single sector tend to resort to non-encompassing business associations to advance their interests. I explain that the choice of such strategies is a consequence of the effectiveness that each of these has in shaping different policy arenas: whereas diversified investors need to influence macro-level policies to protect their investments in multiple sectors, specialized ones prioritize policies that affect their sector alone. These findings suggest that the asset portfolio diversification of the economic elite has consequences for the balance on representation in democratic institutions with important implications for the design and implementation of policies that shape development and redistribution.
Insuring Against Democracy: The Political Economy of Premodern Elites' Asset Portfolio Diversification
Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions. I argue that the creation of domestic financial markets unevenly transformed the asset portfolios of landed elites exposed to different levels of land inequality, reshaping their political and economic incentives. Using previously untapped archival data that allows me to identify landholdings and participation in joint-stock companies of 55,504 elite members, I exploit the approval of the first corporate law that regulated joint-stock companies in Chile in 1854 to show that, given the emergence of new investment opportunities, landed elites that perceived a higher economic risk under democracy strategically hedged such risk by diversifying their holding portfolio into other economic activities. As a consequence, on the one hand, landed elites that insured their capital through portfolio diversification became more supportive of suffrage expansion. On the other hand, diversification of economic interests also produced incentives for diversified elites to seek positions in government at the national level from which they could steer state intervention towards policies with a multiplier effect across the different sectors of the economy where they had investments. Ultimately, the interest of diversified elites in this type of policies resulted in higher investments in public goods in their districts. This set of findings challenges the idea that land inequality has detrimental consequences for democratization and development, and provides novel evidence supporting the argument that initial high levels of land inequality can lead to prosperity.
Commodity Booms, State Capacity and Enfranchisement (with Pablo Beramendi and Melissa Rogers)
A central puzzle in comparative political economy concerns whether and how countries are able to overcome deficits in state capacity. In the absence of inter-state wars, how do countries close the capacity gap? In this paper, we analyze the conditions under which positive income shocks, in particular commodity booms, help middle-income countries close the capacity gap. Our argument focuses on the sequence between the consolidation of a minimum stock of capacity and the arrival of democracy. When capacity predates democracy, positive income shocks reinforce capacity investments. By contrast, when democracy predates capacity, elites are constrained in their efforts to close the capacity gap. Elites overspend and undertax in compensation efforts, undermining capacity investments. To assess this theory empirically, we study the effects of commodity booms on tax revenue and the distribution of sectoral subsidies. Using a new measure capturing exogenous changes in the price of national commodity portfolios, we find that nations that developed capacity before democratization collect higher tax revenue after the shock and reinvest the surplus revenue in the booming sector. In contrast, nations that democratized before building capacity see tax revenues fall in the aftermath of commodity booms and shift their subsidies to other sectors, creating new revenue commitments that persist after the boom. The results suggest that early capacity investments have crucial long-run effects on state capacity and cross-national fiscal policies.
The Origins of Dual Malapportionment: Historical Evidence from Argentina (with Joan Ricart-Huguet)
Legislative malapportionment often results from a credible commitment between elites from peripheral and core regions that favors the former. Research shows that such agreements typically arise at critical junctures like the birth of federations, constitutional conventions, and transitions to democracy. However, why do elites in the most populous, and usually more prosperous, regions accept to be persistently underrepresented? Why do these elites not renege and try to revert their fortunes in the legislature? We argue that the overrepresentation of the core region(s) may be in the executive cabinet acts as a compensation mechanism. We evaluate this argument leveraging a novel dataset of all ministers and legislators from Argentina since the creation of the federation in 1862 until 2015. We first confirm that legislative malapportionment has existed since the initial federal pact. Second, we show that existing literature has overlooked cabinet malapportionment, and Buenos Aires' overrepresentation in particular. In the 19th century, this compensation aided the state-building project by decreasing interregional conflict. In the 20th century, Buenos Aires' dominance in the cabinet persisted, also driven by its human capital and dense political elite networks. Our findings highlight the informal dynamics of compensation mechanisms among elites, which enable the emergence and maintenance over time of heterogeneous polities, including federations.