The Politics that Political Purges Make: Legacies of Authoritarian Politics on Democratic Brazil

Date: 

Tuesday, October 3, 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S250, 1730 Cambridge Street

hidalgo

Speaker: Daniel Hidalgo, Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor of Political Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University

Authoritarian regimes with elected legislatures often use purges and exile to ensure that political elites remain compliant while the autocrats are in power, as well as to benefit favored elites during democratic transitions. To what extent can autocrats shape the distribution of power amongst the post-transition political elites? To answer this question, I rely on previously untapped data on politicians exiled and purged during military dictatorship in Brazil.

F. Daniel Hidalgo is the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his doctorate in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and received a BA at Princeton University. Hidalgo is a past recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright program, and the Experiments in Governance and Politics Network. His research focuses on the political economy of elections, campaigns, and representation in developing democracies, especially in Latin America, as well as quantitative methods in the social sciences. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Review of Economic and Statistics and the American Journal of Political Science. His working paper “Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate Through Clientelism” (with Simeon Nichter) received the Kellogg-Notre Dame Award for best paper in comparative politics.