Democratic representation is constrained by the alternatives available to voters. In this paper, we develop a methodology to gauge the extent to which the "supply side" of politics hinders voter welfare. Using rich data on thousands of candidates in three Brazilian legislative elections, we...

Extreme inequality in Brazil is self-evident. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho emblematically chose to end his book on the history of citizenship in Brazil with the severe diagnosis that 'inequality is the slavery of today, the new cancer that hinders the constitution of a democratic...

Over the past decades, inequality has risen not just in advanced economies but also in many emerging market and developing economies, becoming one of the key global policy challenges. And throughout the 20th century, Latin America was associated with some of the world's highest levels of...