Why do drug trafficking organizations sometimes prey on the communities in which they operate, but sometimes provide assistance to these communities? What explains their strategies of extortion and cooptation toward civil society? We argue that the level of territorial contestation among armed...

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...

Redistricting affects directly the translation of votes to seats, and is therefore one of the most politicized procedures within electoral management. Mexico’s approach is unique – since 1996 an independent board has been creating plans algorithmically. Parties, however, are able to...

We use a dynamic item response theory model (Martin and Quinn 2002) to investigate ideal point stability in Mexico's IFE, an election regulatory board. Results indicate that stability is not predominant, that most board members moved considerably a good deal of the time. We discuss how theories...

Executive-legislative deadlock is perceived as the Achilles’ heel of presidential democracy, because its occurrence has been associated with democratic breakdown in Latin America. Given the centrality of deadlock in the literature, I propose a simple spatial model of executive-legislative...

A key premise of partisan theories of congressional organization is that majority status confers substantial procedural advantages. In a recent paper (Cox and Magar 1999), we took advantage of the Republicans’ historic victory in the midterm elections of 1994 to assess the value of majority...

Do citizens view state and traditional authorities as substitutes or complements? Past work has been divided on this question. Some scholars point to competition between attitudes toward these entities, suggesting substitution, whereas others highlight positive correlations, suggesting...

We demonstrate that political geography has value to firms. We do so by exploiting shocks to political maps that occur around redistricting cycles in the United States. These keep some firms in Congressional districts that are largely unchanged at one extreme and reassign other firms to entirely...

We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers' party when...