Featured Research

Electoral Studies

In federal democracies, parties often invest in local politics as a strategy to improve their performance on upcoming national elections. In this study, I use the concept of reverse coattails to investigate how winning local elections affect upper-level electoral dynamics in Brazil. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD), I show that parties in Brazil boost their national performance, earning more votes on House elections in districts where their members control local offices. I discuss how access to “pork” controlled by co-partisan House members and mechanical information gains explain these effects. Additionally, I use a Bayesian LASSO algorithm to address data sparsity in RDD designs, and to demonstrate the existence of prolarge party bias on the coattail effects. By disentangling the various effects of winning local elections, this paper contributes to a greater understanding of how parties build electoral strength in fragmented democracies.
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Latin America Politics and Society

In these polarized and challenging times, not even perceptions of personal risk are immune to partisanship. This paper introduces results from a new survey with an embedded social media experiment conducted during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Descriptive results show that pro-government and opposition partisans report very different expectations of health and job risks. Job and health policy have become wedge issues that elicit partisan responses. We exploit random variation in the survey recruitment to show the effects of the first President’s speech on national TV on risk perceptions and how partisanship moderates these results. We conclude with a framing experiment that models key cognitive mechanisms driving partisan differences in perceptions of health risks and job security during the COVID-19 crisis
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Digital Journalism

The increasing importance of news sharing, and its effect on the routines, practices, and values described by the hierarchy of influences model, raises new questions about content creation in polarized social media environments. How does news sharing change the gatekeeping preferences of news organizations? Will polarized users polarize news organizations further? We model users’ news sharing behavior using observational data from Twitter and then use the parameters from our model to explain its effect on editorial gatekeeping. We test our model using Twitter data collected during the election of populist leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
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Publications

(2020). Do Mayors Matter? Reverse Coattails on Congresional Elections in Brazil. Electoral Studies.

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(2020). Will I Get Covid? Partisanship, Social Media Frames, and Perceptions of Health Risk in Brazil. Latin America Politics and Society.

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(2020). Polarization, News Sharing, and Gatekeeping: A study of the Bolsonaro Election. Digital Journalism.

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(2020). The Workers’ Party and Participatory Institutions: The Influence of Intra-party Dynamics in the Adoption of Participatory Budgeting. Dados, vol.63.

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(2017). More Participation, Greater Responsiveness? National Public Policy Conferences and the Quality of Democracy in Brazil. In Dados, In Portugues.

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Under Review

Recent advancements in online streaming technologies have re-centered the audience as an important part of live broadcasts, including …

Recent increases in uncivil dialogue, political polarization, and fake news in social media raise questions about the relationship …

We present the results of a survey experiment designed to evaluate the effects of social media exposure on perceptions of personal …

We investigate how streaming chatboxes may shape perceptions of political events. We conducted a field experiment during the September …

This article introduces the concept of adjudication to define the act of granting or denying ownership of an outcome to individuals or …
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Work in Progress

Pre-Prints Available upon Request

Voting for Violence: The Election of Law and Order Politicians in Brazil
Tiago Ventura, Dissertation Chapter, In preparation

Have no Faith in Constitutions? The Content of Rebel Constitutions in Civil War
Katherine Sawyer, William Reed, and Tiago Ventura
*Draft prepared for the Annual Meeting of APSA, 2019 *

The Electoral Killing Cycle
Mariana Carvalho and Tiago Ventura
Draft prepared for the Annual Meeting of MPSA, 2019

Teaching

Workshops/R tutorials

Undergraduate Seminars

Curriculum

You can download my CV here