Guadalupe TuñónI am an Assistant Professor in Princeton's Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs. I study comparative politics and political economy with a regional focus on Latin America. My first book project investigates how religious ideas about economics and inequality shape the electoral and policy influence of religious actors.
I received my PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2019. Before coming to Princeton, I was an Academy Scholar at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs as well as a predoctoral fellow at the Identity & Conflict Lab (University of Pennsylvania) and the Center for the Study of Religion and Society (University of Notre Dame). You can reach me at: tunon[at]princeton.edu |
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Peer-Reviewed Articles
2022. Does the Monetary Cost of Abstaining Increase Turnout? Causal Evidence from Peru. Electoral Studies, 75 (with German Feierherd and Gerson Julcarima-Alvarez).
[Report for the Peruvian Electoral Commission]
2015. Who Wants an Independent Court? Political Competition and Supreme Court Autonomy in the Argentine Provinces, 1984-2008. The Journal of Politics, 77 (1) (with Marcelo Leiras and Agustina Giraudy).
[Replication]
[Report for the Peruvian Electoral Commission]
2015. Who Wants an Independent Court? Political Competition and Supreme Court Autonomy in the Argentine Provinces, 1984-2008. The Journal of Politics, 77 (1) (with Marcelo Leiras and Agustina Giraudy).
[Replication]
Working Papers
"Placebo Tests for Causal Inference" (with Andy Eggers and Allan Dafoe). Revise and Resubmit.
Placebo tests allow researchers to probe the soundness of a research design by checking for an association that might be present if the study is flawed but should be absent otherwise. Despite the growing popularity of placebo tests, the principles for designing and interpreting them have remained obscure. Drawing on a comprehensive survey of recent empirical work in political science, we define placebo tests, introduce a typology of tests, and analyze what makes them informative. We consider examples of each type of test and discuss how to design and evaluate tests for specific research designs. In sum, we offer a guide to understanding and using placebo tests to improve causal inference.
"Witch Hunts? Electoral Cycles and Corruption Lawsuits in Argentina" (with German Feierherd and Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos). Revise and Resubmit.
Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical accountability function, but they can also be used for political ends. In this article, we examine the strategic and normative trade-offs that politicians face in taking corruption accusations to court, and whether these accusations follow the electoral cycle. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal court against members of Argentina’s main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we show that corruption accusations are more frequent during the campaign season, especially those filed against politicians linked to the incumbent. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is indeed more salient prior to elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point at which to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on the use of courts as a tool for accountability as well as on debates about the so-called ‘lawfare’ in Latin America.
"When the Church Votes Left: How Progressive Bishops Supported the Workers' Party in Brazil" [Under Review]
Winner of the Mancur Olson Prize for the best dissertation in political economy, APSA 2020
Winner of the Aaron Wildavsky Award for the best dissertation on religion and politics, APSA 2020
Social scientists routinely characterize religious influence in electoral politics as conservative and left-wing parties as fundamentally secular. Against these claims, I argue that progressive Catholic bishops---who actively supported state-led redistribution---were essential to the mobilization of poor voters in favor of the left-wing Workers' Party (PT) in Brazil. The paper uses a natural experiment stemming from Pope John Paul II's appointment to the papacy in 1978, which generated plausibly as-if random variation in the length of progressive bishops' tenures in office. I find that the PT gained electorally in municipalities with longer exposures to progressive bishops. Organizational linkages between progressive bishops and the PT allowed the party to grow its territorial presence and build and enduring electoral advantage. The findings suggest that religious leaders' economic leanings can play an important role in shaping their political effects. They have important implications for theories of political party development and religion's political influence.
"Movin’ on Up? The Impacts of a Large-Scale Home Ownership Lottery in Uruguay" (with Vincent Armentano, Craig McIntosh, Felipe Monestier, Rafael Piñeiro and Fernando Rosenblatt). [Under Review]
We report on a large-scale urban resettlement program in Uruguay. Over the course of seven years the program randomly assigned thousands of low-income households to ownership of apartments in new buildings in middle-class areas, including a subsidy averaging $44,000 per household. We match applicants to comprehensive administrative data on employment, schooling, health, fertility, and voting over the decade subsequent to the move. We find that the program led to a small decline in fertility for women and a two percentage point increase in formal employment, but did not drive school attendance. Likely due to the lack of strong spatial inequality in Uruguay, this relocation program did not result in transformative improvements in the lives of its beneficiaries.
"Disrupting Compliance: The Impact of a Randomized Tax Holiday in Uruguay" (with Thad Dunning, Felipe Monestier, Rafael Piñeiro and Fernando Rosenblatt). [Under Review]
What is the effect of disrupting tax compliance? Governments throughout Latin America use prizes to reward and motivate citizens who pay their taxes on time. We study the effects of one such policy in Montevideo, Uruguay that raffles tax holidays at random to punctual taxpayers. Using individual payment records as an unobtrusive outcome measure, we combine natural, field and survey experiments to study the effects of the policy. Contrary to the policy’s aims, winning a tax holiday in fact reduces tax compliance on average for two years after the interruption of payments, and there appears to be no compensating incentive effect from informing delinquent taxpayers of their chance to win a holiday. Our evidence strongly suggests that the negative effect arises because the holiday disrupts the habit of paying taxes. Our findings thus provide broader insights into behavioral foundations of compliance, while also suggesting effective policy modifications.
"Freedom in Oppressive Societies: How Emancipation Led to Imprisonment in Buenos Aires, 1820--1830" (with Valentin Figueroa)
We show that the emancipation of enslaved Black persons led to their subsequent imprisonment. To establish causality, we study a lottery of certificates of freedom in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires that randomly freed a small group of enslaved persons. Through archival research and digitization of the full count of the handwritten 1810 census, we link lottery winners and a set of eligible nonwinners to police records and use these data to assess the effect of emancipation on imprisonment. We find that emancipation increased the probability of imprisonment, on average, by 15 percentage points. Our results show that the link between emancipation and imprisonment predated abolition and was present in a non--labor-intensive economy, suggesting that punitive criminal justice systems were not crafted purely to cater to the labor market concerns of former slaveholders but were rather the reflection of a racist ideology mandating the subjugation of Black persons.
"Special Interest Trade-Offs: Campaign Finance Reforms and Religious Influence in Politics in Brazil" (with Melani Cammett and Lucas Novaes)
A growing literature focuses on campaign finance in developing countries and related reforms to curb the influence of economic interests in electoral politics. We argue that such reforms can facilitate the political entry of other organized interests—those with access to cost-effective mobilizational resources, local presence, and the capacity to coordinate these assets. As such, campaign spending reforms can benefit parties supported by religious organizations, particularly those with more centralized structures. We support this argument through a study of Republicanos, one of Brazil’s main Evangelical parties. Leveraging a municipal reform, we show that stricter campaign spending limits increase the electoral entry and victory of Republicanos and that its alliance with the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God was central to these gains. Our findings highlight the political tradeoffs of campaign spending reforms, which can curb the influence of economic interests while empowering other powerful interests.
"Why do Authoritarian Successor Parties Succeed?: How Francoist Legacies in the Spanish Catholic Church Boosted Regime Successor Party Performance", with Miguel Alquezar-Jus and Viivi Jarvi
This paper investigates the influence of civil society organizations on the trajectories of political parties after democratic transition. In particular, we study variation in the electoral success of authoritarian successor parties—parties with roots in a past authoritarian regime—in post-Franco Spain. While the existing literature has cited clientelistic ties to the electorate or to key economic or local elites to explain successor party success, we suggest that ties to religious organizations are also crucial. Underscoring the role of the Catholic Church, we show that the presence of Franco-appointed bishops boosts successor party performance. We leverage exogenous variation in the timing of post-transition bishop retirement to estimate the effects of the length of municipalities’ exposure to Francoist bishops on electoral outcomes. We find that longer exposure to Francoist bishops increases vote shares for successor parties in the democratic period. This effect seems to be amplified by the local presence of religious movements created during the dictatorship to strengthen commitment to the National-Catholicism that lay at the core of Franco’s ideological project. This paper brings to the fore a new set of institutions—religious ones—in the transmission of authoritarian legacies into democracy; highlights the long-term ramifications of autocratic ideological state-building on democratic electoral politics; and contributes to the literature on religion’s influence on politics.
Other Publications
2015. Graphical Presentation of Regression Discontinuity Results (with Natália S. Bueno). The Political Methodologist, blog and print newsletter.
2019. Religious Regulation in Brazil. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics & Religion. (with Claudia Cerqueira)
Forthcoming. Causal Inference and Knowledge Accumulation in Historical Political Economy. The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy. (with Anna Callis and Thad Dunning)
Forthcoming. Knowledge Accumulation Through Natural Experiments. The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science. (with Anna Callis and Thad Dunning)
2019. Religious Regulation in Brazil. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics & Religion. (with Claudia Cerqueira)
Forthcoming. Causal Inference and Knowledge Accumulation in Historical Political Economy. The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy. (with Anna Callis and Thad Dunning)
Forthcoming. Knowledge Accumulation Through Natural Experiments. The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science. (with Anna Callis and Thad Dunning)