Abstract: Lateinamerika hat sich in den vergangenen drei Jahrzehnten stark verändert. Auf die Demokratisierungsprozesse seit Ende der 1970er Jahre folgte in den 1980er Jahren die Hinwendung zu neoliberalen Entwicklungsstrategien. Die Reformen sorgten für wirtschaftliche Stabilität, ihre...

This paper explores the relationship between a large government cash transfer programme, changes in inequality, and political participation in Mexico. The results show that increases in the coverage of the programme during the 2008 financial crisis resulted in greater individual participation in...

Does information about rampant political corruption increase electoral participation and the support for challenger parties? Democratic theory assumes that offering more information to voters will enhance electoral accountability. However, if there is consistent evidence suggesting that voters...

The Mexico City Policy (MCP) prohibits the United States Agency for International Development from providing aid to international non-governmental organizations that provide abortion-related services. This paper employs a panel data of 151 developing countries over the period of 1988 - 2010, to...

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New...

We investigate the dimensionality of Mexico's Supreme Court by analyzing individual justice behavior in judicial review petitions heard between 1995 and 2007. We specify a dynamic, two-dimensional item response model to estimate ideal points and their temporal drift from all contested votes...

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New...

Politicians often struggle to claim credit for programmatic policies and therefore use personalized benefits to win elections. Non-programmatic strategies that target individual voters provide a greater electoral return, even if the technocratic provision of public goods would better serve...

We study how proximate neighbors affect one’s propensity to vote using data on 12 million registered voters in Mexico. To identify this effect, we exploit idiosyncratic variation at the neighborhood block level resulting from approximately one million relocation decisions. We find that when...