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¡Hola! I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Vanderbilt University. My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics, public opinion, and political methodology, with a regional focus on Latin America.

I am interested in how citizens make sense of democracy when its boundaries become contested. When do people recognize that an institutional reform, a presidential action, or a political conflict is not just politics as usual, but a democratic violation? When does that recognition become politically consequential? And what role do courts, electoral authorities, legislatures, parties, and other public actors play in helping citizens decide where the democratic line has been crossed?

My dissertation, Who Draws the Line? Democratic Norms, Boundary-Defining Actors, and Accountability in Democratic Backsliding, examines these questions through original focus groups, cross-national surveys, anchoring vignette experiments, and online survey experiments in Latin America. I argue that democratic accountability depends not only on citizens’ private commitment to democracy, but also on shared expectations about which actions violate democratic norms and whether others would punish them.

Across my broader research agenda, I ask how citizens understand and evaluate democratic institutions, how political elites shape those perceptions, and under what conditions public opinion translates into democratic accountability. I am particularly interested in questions such as: How do people form judgments about institutional reforms? When do administrative decisions strengthen or undermine confidence in democracy? How do political actors influence the way citizens interpret democratic rules and procedures? And how can we measure these processes accurately using surveys and experiments?

I explore these questions across several projects that examine democracy from different institutional entry points. In my work on Mexico’s judicial reform, I study how citizens evaluate a highly technical institutional change once it is framed either as democratic renewal or as a threat to checks and balances. In my project on election administration, I ask whether directly participating in the organization of elections can change how citizens understand democratic institutions from the inside. My work on online survey samples examines a methodological problem that is central to studying public opinion in the region: whose voices are captured when we rely on digital panels, and what kinds of citizens are systematically harder to reach? In related projects on pre-electoral coalitions and participatory budgeting in Mexico, I study how formal democratic rules shape representation, participation, and citizen influence. Together, these projects ask how institutions become legible to citizens, how political actors shape that legibility, and when public opinion becomes a force for democratic accountability.