Research agenda
My independent research agenda seeks to identify how our personal and professional experiences shape the way we think about politics, with special focus on the intersection of political economy and gender in Latin America. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative data analysis with online surveys, field interviews, and big data analysis, I work on a number of projects that explore how workplace settings and experiences affect our political and economic preferences. Additional research projects also consider how women in politics experience discrimination, impacting policy-making, and the effect of specific group identities on political behavior in the United States.
My current research as part of the Water and Sanitation (WSA) Knowledge team at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) focuses on exploring and measuring Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), understanding the relative weight of best practices in utilities management, identifying how consumers think about their water and sanitation services, exploring the perceived value of water and how that impacts water conservation and bill payment, and studying intrahousehold gendered dynamics for water-related decision-making.
Below you will find a list of each research project I am involved in at the moment, and a brief abstract.
Publications and Working Papers
"The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches" (with Dr. Sebastian Vallejo, University of Houston)
Working Paper, iLCSS. July 2020. (Link to article) - Forthcoming in The Journal of Politics (JOP)
Floor time in legislatures is a valuable commodity that legislators use to gain political capital and electoral benefits. There are well known political and institutional barriers to participation, but these do not explain gender differences in access to floor time. In this paper, we look at the role interruptions play as potential barriers to floor time. We explore how women strategically react to these barriers, and consider how these reactions ultimately lead to gendered differences in legislative participation. Our findings show that differences in participation across genders are a consequence of rational strategies followed by women who sacrifice floor time in the short term to avoid the long-term cost of challenging gendered barriers, such as interruptions. We test our argument using original data on legislative speech in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1988 and 2018.
"Water and Sanitation Services in Latin America: Access and Quality Outlook" (with Dr. Fabiana Machado and Darcia Datshkovsky, IDB)
IDB Technical Note IDB-TN-2177. Link here
Tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is critical to evaluate how far the water and sanitation sector is from achieving these targets, and to guarantee that the solutions and strategies implemented get everyone closer to them. But this is not a simple task. To truly assess collective progress towards achieving SDG 6 (and all other goals), it is fundamental to count on standardized measures that help track all types of access, their reliability, and their quality. Existing data tend to lack comparability across sources and locations because they rely on different definitions and categories. Samples are often not representative of all groups within the population. More developed areas are more likely to collect data, which results in the overrepresentation of groups that enjoy better services. Still in some areas and for some categories of information data is not available at all. In response to these challenges, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) partnered with the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to gather nationally representative and comparable data in 18 countries in the region. The goal of this effort was to provide an initial outlook of the current landscape of water and sanitation services in the region, using two batteries of questions in the LAPOP questionnaire for the 2018-2019 wave. The main message that arises is that the Latin American and the Caribbean region faces a wide range of challenges, that vary both across and within countries. Some areas face the primary challenge of closing access gaps, while others display higher deficiency in service quality, such as continuity. The gaps in quality of services, in particular, are not clearly perceived by users. In general, levels of satisfaction with the services received is quite high among the population, much higher than warranted by the objective measures of service quality. This raises important issues for accountability in the sector. If users are mostly satisfied with the current state of affairs, it is unlikely they will pressure governments and utilities to improve service delivery. A more in-depth analysis is required to understand the reasons behind these opinions and possible ways to raise awareness.
"Legislative Debates in the Ecuadorian Congress" (with Dr. Sebastian Vallejo, University of Houston)
Book Chapter in Back, Hanna, Marc Debus and Jorge M. Fernandes (Eds.) (2021). The Politics of Legislative Debates Around the World. Oxford University Press.
In this chapter we describe the institutional settings of legislative debates in the Ecuador Congress and evaluate the speech-making patterns using original data from 1988 to 2018. We show that the main determinants of participation in debates in Ecuador are whether legislators hold positions of power within the legislature and whether the legislator is from the same party as the President of Congress. In addition, we highlight the significance of gender as a determinant for access to the floor and floor time. Specifically, we find that women speak less and for a shorter time than men. We also show that increasing descriptive participation of women in the legislature is not enough to increase participation on the floor and find that women in positions of power are able to eliminate the participation gap with men.
"Detras de la brecha de género: desigualdad en el mercado laboral y diferencias en preferencias economicas"
Published in Revista SAAP. Volume 10, N 1, June 2016. (Link to article)
What explains women’s economic attitudes? In this paper, I argue that economic attitudes held by female citizens are significantly shaped by their perception of gender-based inequality in the labor market. However, this is not the case for men. Therefore, this paper suggests that women incorporate perceptions of labor inequality in their decision-making, and this helps explain the gender gap in economic attitudes. I test this hypothesis crossnationally by running an ordered logit model for survey data from Pew Global Research for Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and the United States in 2010. I operationalize economic perceptions based on two different variables: attitudes towards the state of the national economy, and opinions on trade openness. The results support the argument that women incorporate labor inequality, negatively related to their perception of the national economy.
"Refraining is not Reforming: Female Legislators, Multiple Equilibria, and Corruption" (with Dr. Joel Simmons, Georgetown University) Under review
Abstract coming soon
"Racial Stereotypes in Latin America" (with Dr. Marcus Johnson, University of Maryland, College Park)
Abstract coming soon
"The Convergence of Social and Partisan Identities in Presidential Voting Behavior" (with Dr. Charlie Hunt, Boise State University)
Is social identity driving partisanship in American politics? We argue that the alignment of social and partisan identity has increased over the past five presidential elections, with tangible and substantial effects on voting behavior in the electorate. We test our hypotheses using an original dataset that combines county-level demographic and socioeconomic voter data with presidential election results in the United States from 2000 to 2016. We estimate five different models to measure the cross-sectional and intertemporal effect of social identities on vote share for Republicans. Our results support previous experimental work on the substantive effects social identity variables have in American politics; namely, we find that distinct social identities are becoming more closely aligned with each other, and with one of two distinct partisan identities more generally. We demonstrate the powerful impact of this alignment on voter behavior within and across elections. More specifically, we find that social identity variables explain an increasing amount of the variation in partisan voting behavior with each passing election: while social identity accounted only for 37% of all variation in county-level vote choice in 2000, that number has risen to 72% in 2016. Politics in America has become more personal, with pervasive effects for electoral politics and beyond.
"Women and The Labor Market of Politics" (with Dr. Gabriela Cugat, International Monetary Fund)
We re-examine the relationship between female labor force participation and political representation. The higher the rate of female labor force participation, the more women there are in political office. The reason for this positive correlation in existing studies is fairly straightforward: working women have access to skills and resources like money, exposure to politics, and civic skills that make them more prone to get involved in politics. Access to these resources and skills, however, is conditional to the type of job women take on. We explore how working women accumulate these resources at different rates based on their type of occupation and industry of work. This variation has a direct impact on the share of working women that decide to pursue a political career. Therefore, the positive correlation between female labor force participation and female politicians in office depends on two different aspects: selection of sector of work prior to pursuing a political career, and labor market frictions that arise from differences in accumulated resources. Our goal with this project is to shed light on the relationship between the share of women in the workplace and those who pursue a career in politics, disentangling the effect of preferences from the effect of frictions.
Support is Not Enough: The Role of Meritocracy and Sexism in Equal Pay (Dissertation)
Since 2015, Argentina has witnessed an unprecedented increase in women’s mobilization around gender issues such as violence against women and reproductive rights. In this context, presidential support for equal pay policy was not enough to bring the issue upfront. This project addresses the determinants of support for equal pay. While support for this policy is high at first, meritocracy and sexism play a key role in our understanding of what is fair and who is deserving in the labor market. I argue that the labor market structure relies on gender biases that make it a misogynistic environment, even if participants do not individually align with sexist views. In such an environment, meritocratic views as aspirational can increase support for equal pay, but this effect is conditional on sexism. Alternatively, meritocracy serves as a hierarchy-legitimizing ideology, which in combination with modern sexism, reduces support for corrective policies like equal pay. Contrary to theoretical expectations, and popular agreement among respondents, stripping equal pay policy from its gender perspective does not increase support for this initiative. Instead, it reduces it. I present evidence for this theoretical framework using two original online studies administered in Argentina in 2018 and 2019. These studies are the first ones to combine micro-level data on labor market participation and political preferences with survey experiments.