Research

How does the emergence of new elites influence electoral fraud? Electoral malpractices were pervasive before democratization, and the existing literature argues that intra-elite competition promoted democratization through franchise extensions and cleaner electoral laws. However, we lack information on how rising intra-elite competition influenced electoral fraud \emph{practices}, even when new elites could not shape legislation. This paper explores whether a regional elite party in 20th-century Catalonia influenced electoral fraud dynamics by analyzing precinct-level electoral data through forensic techniques and statistical inference methods, supplemented by qualitative evidence from newspapers and memoirs. The results indicate that electoral fraud decreased with the presence of new elites and shifted the types of electoral malpractices. New regional elites, lacking access to state resources, resorted to electoral mobilization tools and shifted the electoral manipulation strategies. This paper shows that intra-elite competition, beyond formal reforms, can foster democratization by cleaning up electoral procedures.

Do economic shocks influence elite democratic attitudes and commitment? Elites play a crucial role in shaping democratization processes and their consent is oftentimes thought of as a necessary condition to consolidate democratic political institutions (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006; Boix, 2003). Yet, this theory has never been tested at the micro-level with individual data. In this paper we exploit the failure of a large bank in Catalonia in 1931 to assess the impact in democratic support held by individuals exposed and unexposed to this financial shock. We use a novel individual-level database that assembles the amounts lost by each individual depositor of the bank, and then we match individuals to their electoral turnout behavior in different elections from individual voting roll calls. We specially focus on the last elections before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to capture support for democracy because in this election elites were divided and part of the political parties boycotted the elections, hence making turnout a \textit{de facto} signal of support for democracy. This unique setting allows us to test whether economic interests are indeed influential on elites’ democratic consent at the individual-level. The individual panel structure of the data allows the inclusion of individual FEs and a difference-in-difference identification strategy that exploits individuals’ differential turnout rates across several elections. Preliminary results indicate that, as expected, individuals exposed to financial losses were less likely to turnout in the last elections before the Spanish Civil War. We interpret this differential abstention rates among individuals exposed to the bank collapse as evidence of a loss in democratic consent of these individuals. To explore further the mechanism, we plan to match the individual depositors lists and the individual voting roll calls with individual registers of political associations and clubs. We show that the differential abstention rates among depositors exposed to the bank collapse are driven by individual members of associations and clubs that explicitly supported the boycott of the last democratic elections. Overall, we provide the first ever individual-level evidence from the interwar period that shows that individual elites’ exposure to financial shocks during the 1930s caused the abandonment of individual democratic consent.

Paper available upon request

New communication technologies have important economic and political consequences. The availability of a new communication technology can become a weapon in hands of elites to obtain larger shares of political power ―either through coercion or mobilization but also a powerful resource for new challenger parties. In this paper we explore the political consequences of telephone network expansion in a semi-autocratic regime; we focus in Catalonia in the 1901-1923 period. We analyze the political consequences of a new public telephone network through a diff-in-diff identification strategy based on the timing and characteristics of telephones at the municipality-level. We also exploit distances to the existing private networks to exogeneize telephone extension and to test the robustness of our findings. Our main results show that new challenger parties directly benefited from the extension of telephone networks and reduced support rates for status quo elite parties. The heterogeneous effects of telephone extensions point out to a double dynamic of (i) elite replacement of status quo elites by new economic elites and (ii) voters' mobilization associated with telephone expansions among left-wing parties. Our findings contribute to better understanding the political consequences of new communication technologies in semi-autocratic contexts, where new political parties are as interested in advancing their position as to erode the influence capacity of entrenched status quo elites.

Working paper version here

Authoritarian regimes vary widely in their institutional characteristics, including the presence and type of power sharing institutions. This variation does not occur only across regimes, but also within regime, over time, and across levels of government. There is abundant research on the consequences of authoritarian institutions on regime duration and stability, but less is known about how they shape democratic competition after democratization. In this paper we study the effect of the adoption of local indirect election of mayors in the late Francoism in Spain on subsequent patterns of local fragmentation and volatility, as observed after democratization. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that only half of the municipalities were selected to locally appoint their mayor in 1976, while the other half had mayors appointed by the provincial governors all the way until the first democratic elections in 1979. Selection was based on the length of the tenure of the sitting mayor, so it creates a discontinuity that we exploit for identification using an RDD approach. We explore whether this pre-democratic local competition reinforced the regime heritage parties or, on the contrary, favored the opposition. Results show how in those localities in which there was an indirect mayoral election, opposition parties were able to organize earlier and had better results in the subsequent fully democratic local elections.

Reports & Published Working Papers

• New Productive Models Against COVID-19: Beyond the choice between saving the economy and saving lives. 2020 [Link]

• Case study: The Closing of the Model Prison. 2018 [Link] [CATALAN]

• Curto, F. & Pau Vall-Prat, 2016. 'Mesurar la governança: Anàlisi dels World Governance Indicators', EsadeGeo Working Paper 27. [link] [CATALAN]

Consultancy Projects

• Anàlisi  de  l’organització  i de  les  entitats  membres en  clau  de  governança. 2019 [Link] [CATALAN]

• La provisió d'atenció integrada: una aproximació internacional comparada. 2016

• Una proposta de criteris de governança per a una organització tributària moderna. 2014.  [Link] [CATALAN]