Research

Who Else Would Punish? Coordination and Citizen Enforcement of Democratic Norms

Why do citizens who recognize a democratic violation so often fail to punish it? I argue that enforcement depends on coordination-readiness, whether recognition is connected to the expectation that other citizens will respond and to one’s own willingness to sanction. Original validation surveys in Mexico and Argentina identify historically grounded democratic boundaries that differ in how ready citizens are to coordinate around them. Preregistered experiments with more than 6,000 respondents then test the mechanism. Truthful information that fellow citizens would punish a politician responsible for the violation increases respondents’ own sanctioning by roughly five to nine percentage points, with the largest effects through electoral punishment in Mexico and protest in Argentina. The cue changes what citizens expect of one another and moves them toward recognizing and sanctioning the violation together, while leaving their expectation that the government will actually be constrained largely unchanged. Uncertainty about other citizens turns out to be one source of weak democratic accountability.

Political Alignment and the Limits of Democratic Persuasion: Evidence from Latin America

Who tolerates policies that weaken the limits on executive power, and how much can information about their democratic costs change those judgments? I argue that citizens read these conflicts through their relationship with the sitting president, which sorts tolerance of weakened constraints more consistently than party identification or vote intention. The evidence comes from the 2025/26 AmericasBarometer in sixteen countries, two original national surveys fielded around Mexico’s 2024 judicial reform, and preregistered experiments in Mexico and Argentina. Citizens who approve of the president are more tolerant of executives who bypass judges, Congress, and the law, in every country and after accounting for party and vote. A message about the democratic costs of a real government policy lowers support for it, and it leaves beliefs about the president’s limits and the willingness to punish the government at the polls unchanged.

Who Speaks for Democracy? Public Authority and Citizen Responses to Democratic Violations

When can horizontal accountability trigger vertical accountability? I introduce the concept of public democratic authority, citizens’ recognition that an actor has standing to judge whether conduct in a given political domain crosses a democratic boundary. Two measurement studies in Mexico and Argentina show that this authority varies across domains, between what citizens themselves would do and what they expect of others, and across political camps. A preregistered survey experiment then holds the democratic judgment fixed and varies only the institution delivering it. Institutional statements increase recognition and expected collective enforcement relative to silence, but the institution with more validated authority does not consistently produce a larger response. Possessing public democratic authority and being able to activate it turn out to be different things.

Strange Bedfellows? How Ideologically Incoherent Coalitions Shape Partisan Identity

With Salvador Ascencio Pastora.

Do voters penalize parties that enter electoral coalitions with ideologically distant partners? Combining observational data from Mexico’s 2021 federal election with an original survey experiment, we trace the electoral and identity-based consequences of these alliances. Support within them comes mainly from core partisans, and tolerance toward coalition partners is negatively associated with overall party support. Voters recognize policy incoherence when it is made salient, yet their partisan identification barely moves. The results speak to the durability of party brands and the limits of voter updating in unconsolidated democracies.

Learning by Doing: The Effect of Organizing an Election on Political Attitudes, Information Acquisition, and Political Efficacy (work in progress)

Does administering an election foster democratic engagement? This project, currently in the design stage, leverages a natural experiment in Mexico’s poll-worker appointment process. Among citizens who have already been selected, trained, and agreed to serve, a randomly drawn surname letter orders each electoral section’s roster and appointments proceed to a section-specific cutoff, which identifies the local effect of appointment. A two-wave design links administrative records from the National Electoral Institute to surveys fielded before and after Election Day to estimate effects on electoral trust, political knowledge, internal efficacy, and willingness to participate again.

Participatory Budgeting as Bounded Direct Democracy: Citizen Agency and Institutional Responsiveness in Mexico City (work in progress)

With Alejandro Díaz Herrera.

How does direct democracy work under inequality, limited information, and institutional constraint? We study participatory budgeting in Mexico City as a form of bounded direct democracy, where citizens propose and select local public projects but their influence is filtered by administrative rules, feasibility screening, unequal participation, and uneven implementation. With an original administrative dataset covering every process from 2011 to 2025, we trace the full chain of citizen influence, from proposal and institutional review to neighborhood voting and government implementation. Linking these records to demographic, electoral, and neighborhood-level data, the project, now in its data-analysis phase, asks how institutional design shapes the balance between inclusion, deliberation, and responsiveness across unequal urban contexts.