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I am
an Assistant Professor at the Political Science
Department at Stanford University.
I am
affiliated to the Center for Democracy,
Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Stanford Center for International
Development (SCID) and the Center
for Latin American Studies.
My
work deals primarily with authoritarianism, poverty, elections and the rule
of law.
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RECENT NEWS
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Voting
for Autocracy, published by Cambridge University Press has won the Leon
Epstein Award in 2007 for the best book published in the previous two years
in the area of political parties and organizations and the Best book award
in 2007 by the Comparative Democratization section, American Political
Science Association.
The book provides a theory of the logic
of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most
resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime
hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision.
Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow
rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in
the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply throw the
‘rascals out of office’ because their choices were constrained
by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the
autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the
PRI.
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I am finishing a book, Strategies
of Vote Buying: Poverty, Democracy and Social Transfers in Mexico, with
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and
Federico Estévez, on the political economy of social programs in Mexico.
We organized a conference last
September at Stanford where we discussed a first version of the manuscript.
The conference follows up a previous meeting
on distributive politics and development at the Bellagio Center of
the Rockefeller Foundation.
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A paper that spells out our view on the
relationship between clientelism and development is: “The erosion of
party hegemony, clientelism and portfolio diversification: The Programa
Nacional de Solidaridad (Pronasol) in Mexico”,
in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson (eds.) Patrons,
Clients and Policies, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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RECENT PAPERS
"The
Comparative Logics of Autocratic Survival"
"Elections
Under Autocracy and the Strategic Game of Fraud"
(with Federico Estévez and Alberto
Diaz-Cayeros) "Buying-off the Poor: Effects
of Targeted Benefits in the 2006 Presidential Race" Paper
presented at the Conference on the Mexico 2006 Panel Study, Harvard
University, Boston, November 2006.
(with Arianna Sánchez) "An Authoritarian Enclave? The Supreme
Court in Mexico's Emerging Democracy" presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Philadelphia.
(with Vidal Romero) "Political Determinants of Mass
Attitudes Toward Globalization and State Retrenchment in Latin
America" presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, in Philadelphia.
(with Federico Estévez and Alberto
Diaz-Cayeros) "A House Divided Against
Itself: The PRI's Survival After Hegemony".
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During the 2006-2007 academic year I was
the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo Campbell National Fellow and the
Susan Louis Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover
Institution.
I have been writing a book on electoral
authoritarianism. Despite their commonality in the world today, electoral
autocracies have received scant attention. Building upon the micro-logic of
autocratic rule I provided in my Voting
for Autocracy book, I systematically study electoral autocracies around
the world. I develop a theory of autocratic survival providing a micro-logic
of the conditions under which elites and masses will choose to coalesce or
defect the autocratic regime, and of the conditions under which the
autocrat will resort to fraud and force to survive in office. I test some
of the implications of the theory with survival analysis.
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