Cesar Zucco
PhD in Political Science, University of California Los Angeles (2007)
cesar.zucco@fgv.br
Professor of Politics and Public Policy
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Quick links to my c.v. in English, to my and Google Scholar sites, to data from my published articles on the , and to the Brazilian Legislative Surveys project.

I am Professor of Politics and Public Policy at FGV/EBAPE, a school of business and public administration in Rio de Janeiro.  I was previously Assistant Professor at Rutgers, and I have held visiting or temporary appointments at Nuffield College, Princeton, Yale, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and IUPERJ (currently IESP-UERJ). I specialize in Latin American politics, and I have written on executive-legislative relations, political parties, voting behavior, and the politics of public policy in Brazil and in comparative perspective. This website provides information about my published and ongoing projects, as well as links to data and replication materials. I try to keep it updated, but feel free to contact me with suggestions, corrections, or to request materials not available here.

"The Volatility Curse", written in collaboration with Daniela Campello was published by Cambridge University Press in the end of 2020. In this book, we examine the consequences of voters' misattribution of responsibility for economic outcomes, particularly in countries reliant on commodity exports and foreign investment flows, and how this prevents voters from holding incumbents accountable through elections. The first paper in the project was published in The Journal of Politics in 2016, a second piece came out in the same journal in 2020, and other working papers are now circulating or under review (see below). Our research was mentioned in The Economist, featured in Folha de São Paulo, and discussed in several other media outlets in Brazil and abroad. We also published, in the April 2020 edition of Piauí magazine, an analysis of (then President) Bolsonaro's political prospects that builds on some of the arguments that we make in the book. As of 2024 we are finishing a long overdue paper that examines the individual level drivers of the macro-level attribution we identified in the book and slowly moving forward with research on the long term political implications of economic volatility and on ways to mitigate it. 

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My first book "Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans" (with David Samuels) was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press and is now also available in a paperback version. We employed a mix of observational and experimental techniques to examine the determinants and consequences of party identification in Brazil. The main message of the book is that partisanship and antipartisanship developed in tandem in Brazil and have shaped voting behavior to a much greater extent than has been previously acknowledged. We are currently working with Fernando Mello on a series of extensions and updates of the arguments in the book. Recent findings from this project are included in a paper on stereotyping published in Latin American Politics and Society and in a working paper on status loss/gains that was also discussed in this article in Piauí magazine (Feb 2024). 

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Timothy Power and I coordinate the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, a three-decade effort to track and record the beliefs of Brazilian legislators. The 9th wave of the BLS was fielded in the second semester of 2021, several papers out of this project have been accepted or are making their way through the review process, and the updated dataset is now available in the project's repository, where data from the past waves also reside. The 10th wave is planned for 2025. 

I am also engaged in two public policy related projects. One is a Metaketa II field experiment on the formalization of low-income microentrepreneurs, in which I collaborate with Anna-Katharina Lenz, Rafael Goldszmitdt, and Martin Valdivia. Data collection from the endline survey was completed in 2019, two papers were published in Economics Letters and in The Journal of Politics, and more are in the works. The other is a joint project with Natalia Bueno and Felipe Nunes that assesses the political impacts of the "Minha Casa, Minha Vida" housing program. The first papers out of this project were recently published in The Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, and there are more to come.

PEER-REVIEWED BOOKS

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

OTHER SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS 

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

 

Última atualização: 02/10/2024