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I investigate how political incentives affect the behavior of district attorneys (DAs). I develop a theoretical model that predicts DAs will increase sentencing intensity in an election period compared to the period prior. To empirically…
Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make…
We explore the statistical laws behind the plurality voting system by investigating the election results for mayor held in Brazil in 2004. Our analysis indicate that the vote partition among mayor candidates of the same city tends to be…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
The proportional elections held in Brazil in 1998 and 2002 display identical statistical signatures. In particular, the distribution of votes among candidates includes a power-law regimen. We suggest that the rationale behind this robust…
Analysis of vote distributions using current tools from statistical physics is of increasing interest. While data considered for physics studies are subject to a careful understanding of error sources, such analysis are almost absent in…
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments…
Multiple studies have documented racial, gender, political ideology, or ethnical biases in comparative judicial systems. Supplementing this literature, we investigate whether judges rule cases differently when one of the litigants is a…
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence has become a global threat to women's political representation and democracy. Understanding how online hate affects its targets is thus paramount. We analyse 10 million tweets directed at female…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
Risk assessment algorithms in criminal justice put people's lives at the discretion of a simple statistical tool. This thesis explores how algorithmic decision-making in criminal policy can exhibit feedback effects, where disadvantage…
We investigate the impact of judges' gender on the outcome of domestic violence cases. Using data from S\~ao Paulo, Brazil, between 2011 and 2019, we find that a domestic violence case assigned to a female judge is 28% (9.7 p.p.) more…
Adverse economic shocks are known to reshape voter behavior -- the demand side of politics. Much less is known about their consequences for the supply side: how such shocks affect who becomes a politician. This paper examines how job losses…
The principle of democracy is that the people govern through elected representatives. Therefore, a democracy is healthy as long as the elected politicians do represent the people. We have analyzed data from the Brazilian electoral court…
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
We report on a statistical analysis of the engagement in the electoral processes of all Brazilian cities by considering the number of party memberships and the number of candidates for mayor and councillor. By investigating the…
The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do business, but also the way we perform daily activities. In fact, the past Presidential elections in the United States as well as those in Great Britain (Brexit) and in…