Research on Political Order, Violence, and the Limits of State Power.

My early research examined the political foundations of durable authoritarian regimes. In Voting for Autocracy, I developed an account of how dominant parties use elections, economic performance, distributive politics, and institutional arrangements to sustain political support—and of the conditions under which these systems eventually unravel.

Related work examines authoritarian power-sharing, electoral fraud, opposition coordination, and the conditions under which elections contribute to authoritarian stability or political liberalization.

My research examines how criminal organizations govern territories and populations, regulate behavior, extract resources, and compete or collaborate with state institutions.

Drawing particularly on research in Brazil and Mexico, I study criminal organizations not simply as perpetrators of violence but as political actors capable of constructing coercive forms of social order. This work examines variation in criminal governance and the relationships that emerge among armed actors, state institutions, and the populations they govern.

I study police violence, torture, militarized security, and the institutional organization of state coercion. This research examines variation in how states deploy coercive force, the political and institutional conditions that constrain or enable violence by state agents, and the consequences of coercive practices for citizens’ relationships with the state.

A central theoretical concern is the tension between the state’s responsibility to establish order and the institutional constraints on coercion that distinguish democratic government from more authoritarian forms of rule.

My current research brings together my longstanding work on authoritarianism with my research on violence, policing, and criminal governance.

I study how insecurity transforms citizens’ relationship to democracy. Under conditions of crime and violence, citizens may become willing to accept restrictions on civil liberties, due process, judicial independence, and institutional checks on executive authority in exchange for promises of order.

This research investigates when citizens defend democratic constraints despite insecurity, when they become willing to sacrifice those constraints, and how political leaders mobilize fear, perceptions of threat, and demands for security to expand coercive authority.

More broadly, this work examines a fundamental tension within democratic politics: citizens expect democratic states both to constrain coercive power and to exercise sufficient coercive capacity to maintain political order.

These questions form the basis of my current book project on democracy and coercion.

A related strand of my research examines political order outside conventional institutions of representative democracy.

My work on indigenous communities in Mexico and Colombia studies communal governance, political autonomy, control over public resources, and alternative institutions of representation and accountability. It asks how distinct institutional arrangements shape political participation, collective decision-making, and relations between communities and the state.