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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, Making Democratic Boundaries Enforceable: Norms, Shared Expectations, and Citizen Sanction, examines why some democratic violations become politically enforceable boundaries while others remain contested even among citizens who privately object to them. I argue that democratic accountability depends on the alignment of several elements: citizens must recognize that a democratic boundary has been crossed, believe that others share that judgment, and expect that fellow citizens will respond. I study these processes through original focus groups, validation surveys, anchoring-vignette experiments, and preregistered survey experiments in Mexico and Argentina.

My job-market paper, Who Else Would Punish? Coordination and Citizen Enforcement of Democratic Norms, focuses on one central part of this argument: citizens may condemn a democratic violation and still hesitate to sanction the politician responsible when they doubt that others will act. In parallel experiments with more than 6,000 respondents in Mexico and Argentina, I show that truthful information about other citizens’ willingness to punish increases respondents’ own willingness to sanction democratic violations. The evidence points to coordination as an important mechanism: the information changes expectations about collective response more strongly than it changes respondents’ own judgments of the violation.

The dissertation anchors a broader research agenda on how citizens understand democratic institutions, how those institutions acquire public authority, and when public opinion becomes politically consequential. One line of work studies how citizens interpret institutional change. In research on Mexico’s 2024 judicial reform, I examine how citizens evaluated a major transformation of the courts before, during, and after its approval, and how information about its democratic consequences shapes interpretations of the reform and the government behind it.

A second line of work examines how participation in democratic institutions changes citizens themselves. A project on election administration uses the quasi-random appointment of poll workers in Mexico to study whether direct experience administering an election affects political knowledge, institutional trust, and efficacy. Related work on participatory budgeting in Mexico City traces citizen proposals from submission through administrative review, voting, and implementation to study how formal participatory rights translate into actual influence over collective decisions.

Across these projects, I combine surveys, experiments, administrative data, and quasi-experimental designs to study the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions: how democratic boundaries become recognizable, how expectations about others shape political action, and when institutions can convert public concern into effective democratic accountability.