CLEAN Seminar - Juliana Londoño-Vélez (UCLA)

The next CLEAN seminar will take place on Monday 30 January in distance at 4.30pm Italian time.

The presenter will be uliana Londoño-Vélez (UCLA). The title of the paper is : : "Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxation: Evidence from Colombia" .

Abstract:

How does criminal governance affect elections? Existing accounts explore the violent and corrupt consequences of criminal involvement in politics, but have largely overlooked the mechanisms through which they can exert such influence. I argue that criminal groups leverage their territorial control and access to hard-to-reach voters to undermine elections through two mechanisms: (1) corralling mobilizes groups of residents to the polls and (2) gatekeeping prevents rival candidates from accessing voters. I use a natural experiment that leverages exogenous variation in voter assignment to voting booths and a novel dataset on criminal governance to test my theory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I show that corralling increases turnout and influences vote choice, and gatekeeping restricts the candidate pool. Together, these mechanisms decrease competitiveness and increase the probability of victory for criminally allied candidates. I illustrate the logic underpinning the criminal groups' relationships with candidates and with voters using qualitative data based on more than 50 in-person interviews and thousands of anonymous voter complaints. These findings bring together the literatures on clientelism and criminal governance by demonstrating that criminal groups leverage the power they derive from governing to sway elections.

You may follow the event online via Zoom Meetings at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/92992837395?pwd=emZVZ003aFRyd0lBUktYK1I0eHJkQT09 - passcode: 015120