I am Vincent Mauro. I am originally from rural British Columbia, Canada, and did my B.A. in Political Science at McGill University and M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I have a deep passion for most things Latin American. I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University, where I study comparative politics, democracy, political parties, and the politics of inequality. Starting in Fall 2023, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.

My book project argues that democracy can certainly spark an impetus for redistribution, but representation – particularly in the developing world – is far from given, and redistributive outcomes across democracies are highly dependent on the development of party systems. In Latin America and across much of the democratic world, broader patterns of social reform, redistribution, and levels of inequality are highly contingent on both the structure and institutionalization of party systems. Utilizing cross-sectional time-series analysis, as well as two longitudinal cases of Brazil and Colombia based on extensive archival work, I find that countries with stable multi-party systems are more likely to redistribute income, as well as possess lower levels of inequality, than those with inchoate, hegemonic, or two-party counterparts. Further information on a series of published articles related to this project can be found here.

Building on these ideas, a second book project investigates how these struggles for redistribution may produce reverberations on democratic rule itself. In highly unequal countries, the emergence of a ‘redistributive threat’ – a political party aligned with the popular sectors and espousing a populist or redistributive ideology, or a traditional party captured by an upstart redistributivist or populist – may induce fear in ruling economic and political elite coalitions, increasing the likelihood that they engage in undemocratic behavior to prevent the redistributive threat from consolidating power. In these environments, democracy in Latin America has been unlikely to survive. To both build and test the theory, I rely on the historical analysis of the deviant cases of Argentina and Brazil, elite survey experiments, and time-series analysis, to understand how in the last century a significant majority of Latin American democracies have fallen in the presence of, or immediately following the rise of, an emerging redistributive threat.

Lastly, I also am currently conducting a multi-faceted project with co-authors centered on understanding the political behavior of economic elites, particularly in respect to their perceptions of crime, democracy, political parties, and redistribution. In one of these projects we conduct survey experiments on business elites in Mexico, finding that elites are more likely to favor redistribution or the establishment of social programs if designed with intentions to lower crime and insecurity. In another, we fielded a series of survey experiments to more deeply understand why many in the Brazilian business sector, which has been referred to as a “gatekeeper of democracy” for its pro-democratic political behavior in the past, politically supported Jair Bolsonaro – a candidate who explicitly expressed authoritarian views – in the 2018 election.

Feel free to contact me at vrm38@cornell.edu. My CV is available here. You may also be interested in my Twitter account.