Scott W Desposato
Biographic Data
| ID | 161979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Scott W Desposato |
| GIVEN NAMES | Scott W |
| FAMILY NAME | Desposato |
| SIGNATURE | DESPOSATO S W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 600 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The participatory legacy of mobilization and repression: Evidence From a Student Movement
Studies of the participatory legacies of social movements in democratic settings often find that the individuals who take part in these movements remain more likely to engage in politics, decades later. What is the participatory legacy of social movements in authoritarian regimes, where they are often repressed and erased from public memory? Understanding such impacts is challenging due to self-selection and severe censorship. In this paper, we a…
The Long-Term Impact of Mobilization and Repression on Political Trust
Authoritarian regimes respond to threatening student movements with repression and censorship. In many cases, failed movements are effectively erased from public memory. Do such movements affect long-term attitudes? We use a survey of college graduates to measure the impact of a failed student movement. Some of our respondents began college immediately before a major protest; others started after the movement had been suppressed. Using a fuzzy re…
NGOs, Turnout, and the Left: A Sub-national Analysis of Brazil
This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community’s level of …
Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates …
Who Gives, Who Receives, and Who Wins: Transforming Capital Into Political Change Through Nongovernmental Organizations
How does international support for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) lead to political change in the developing world? Massive amounts of domestic government spending and international aid are now distributed through NGOs instead of state bureaucracies. Recent scholarship suggests that this decentralization of developmental aid to NGOs has unintended political effects on recipient communities, but the mechanisms driving political effects are u…
Promoting and Preventing Political Change Through Internationally Funded NGO Activity
A growing percentage of international aid is distributed through local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Scholarship is divided on how that aid affects domestic politics. One side argues that aid to NGOs reinforces the status quo. As NGOs become dependent on external funding, they lose sight of their original goals. The other side contends that channeling funds to NGOs generates associational activity, producing political change by empowering…
The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies
In this paper, I reexamine the impact of electoral institutions on legislative party organization. A long-running theme in comparative politics is that Brazil's political party system is weakened by the structure of its electoral institutions. I revisit this research by comparing legislative parties in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with those in the Brazilian Senate. This comparison allows me to control for political history, constituents, an…
Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies
Party switching by legislators has been common in many countries, including the Philippines, Italy, Nepal, Ecuador, Russia, and Japan. While frequently dismissed as simply an indicator of a weak parties, switching provides a unique window on party systems. To the extent that we understand affiliation decisions, we gain insight on the way politicians use parties to advance their careers. In this article I offer a model of party‐membership patterns…
Correcting for Small Group Inflation of Roll-Call Cohesion Scores
Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are le…
Paving the way to political change: Decentralization of development in the Brazilian Amazon
Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters
Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict
The vast majority of what we know about building prospective electoral constituencies is confined to single-member district systems. However, most legislators are elected in multimember districts. Given that multiple incumbents represent the same voters, how do legislators decide whom they should target as prospective constituents? We build a general model of this decision and test it with travel data for 100 legislators elected in a single, nati…
Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters
Using NES surveys from 1980 through 2000, this article examines the incumbency advantage with a series of survey reports of the vote, an approach that departs from the convention of estimating the incumbent advantage with aggregate election returns. Previous work conceptualizes the incumbency advantage as a small and stable vote bonus of six to eight percentage points since about 1970, based on aggregate electoral returns. This study provides a d…
The Impact of Federalism on National Party Cohesion in Brazil
This article explores the impact of federalism on national party cohesion. Although credited with increasing economic growth and managing conflict in countries with diverse electorates, federal forms of government have also been blamed for weak party systems because national coalitions may be divided by interstate conflicts. This latter notion has been widely asserted, but there is virtually no empirical evidence of the relationship or even an ef…
The Variable Incumbency Advantage: New Voters, Redistricting, and the Personal Vote
In this article we explore the personal vote costs of redistricting. After redistricting, incumbents often face significant numbers of new voters—voters that were previously in a different incumbent's district. Existing conceptualizations of the incumbency advantage suggest that the cost to incumbents of having new voters should be relatively small and predictable. We propose a different formulation: a variable incumbency advantage. We argue that…
Comparing Group and Subgroup Cohesion Scores: A Nonparametric Method with an Application to Brazil
This article builds a nonparametric method for inference from roll-call cohesion scores. Cohesion scores have been a staple of legislative studies since the publication of Rice's 1924 thesis. Unfortunately, little effort has been dedicated to understanding their statistical properties or relating them to existing models of legislative behavior. I show how a common use of cohesion scores, testing for distinct voting blocs, is severely biased towar…
Left Turn on Green: The Unintended Consequences of International Funding for Sustainable Development in Brazil
This article presents the first attempt to examine the political consequences of internationally funded programs that target local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although the purported mission of NGOs is often economic, humanitarian, or environmental, the authors suggest that their impact is also profoundly political. Injections of international resources into underdeveloped, often clientelistic societies can fundamentally change the natur…
Legislative Politics in Authoritarian Brazil
This paper provides the first model of legislative behavior in nondemocratic settings. Many authoritarian regimes have sought to maintain a facade of democracy by creating “puppet” legislatures. These legislatures should always support the regime since uncooperative behavior risks career-ending punishments. But in spite of potentially high costs, legislators do sometimes rebel against military executives. I show how legislative rebellion can be a…
The Partisan Consequences of Majority-Minority Redistricting in the South, 1992 and 1994
This paper demonstrates that the creation of majority-minority districts was no more than an indirect cause of Democratic losses in 1992 and 1994, and the second-order effect of losing familiar voters was more important than the first-order effect of a reduced black constituency. Further, it demonstrates that a pro-GOP surge, independent of redistricting, was the critical factor without which neither new voters nor the reduced black population wo…
Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies
Party switching by legislators has been common in many countries, including the Philippines, Italy, Nepal, Ecuador, Russia, and Japan. While frequently dismissed as simply an indicator of a weak parties, switching provides a unique window on party systems. To the extent that we understand affiliation decisions, we gain insight on the way politicians use parties to advance their careers. In this article I offer a model of party‐membership patterns…
The Variable Incumbency Advantage: New Voters, Redistricting, and the Personal Vote
In this article we explore the personal vote costs of redistricting. After redistricting, incumbents often face significant numbers of new voters—voters that were previously in a different incumbent's district. Existing conceptualizations of the incumbency advantage suggest that the cost to incumbents of having new voters should be relatively small and predictable. We propose a different formulation: a variable incumbency advantage. We argue that…
Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict
The vast majority of what we know about building prospective electoral constituencies is confined to single-member district systems. However, most legislators are elected in multimember districts. Given that multiple incumbents represent the same voters, how do legislators decide whom they should target as prospective constituents? We build a general model of this decision and test it with travel data for 100 legislators elected in a single, nati…
The Impact of Federalism on National Party Cohesion in Brazil
This article explores the impact of federalism on national party cohesion. Although credited with increasing economic growth and managing conflict in countries with diverse electorates, federal forms of government have also been blamed for weak party systems because national coalitions may be divided by interstate conflicts. This latter notion has been widely asserted, but there is virtually no empirical evidence of the relationship or even an ef…
The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies
In this paper, I reexamine the impact of electoral institutions on legislative party organization. A long-running theme in comparative politics is that Brazil's political party system is weakened by the structure of its electoral institutions. I revisit this research by comparing legislative parties in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with those in the Brazilian Senate. This comparison allows me to control for political history, constituents, an…
The Partisan Consequences of Majority-Minority Redistricting in the South, 1992 and 1994
This paper demonstrates that the creation of majority-minority districts was no more than an indirect cause of Democratic losses in 1992 and 1994, and the second-order effect of losing familiar voters was more important than the first-order effect of a reduced black constituency. Further, it demonstrates that a pro-GOP surge, independent of redistricting, was the critical factor without which neither new voters nor the reduced black population wo…
Correcting for Small Group Inflation of Roll-Call Cohesion Scores
Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are le…
Legislative Politics in Authoritarian Brazil
This paper provides the first model of legislative behavior in nondemocratic settings. Many authoritarian regimes have sought to maintain a facade of democracy by creating “puppet” legislatures. These legislatures should always support the regime since uncooperative behavior risks career-ending punishments. But in spite of potentially high costs, legislators do sometimes rebel against military executives. I show how legislative rebellion can be a…
Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates …
Comparing Group and Subgroup Cohesion Scores: A Nonparametric Method with an Application to Brazil
This article builds a nonparametric method for inference from roll-call cohesion scores. Cohesion scores have been a staple of legislative studies since the publication of Rice's 1924 thesis. Unfortunately, little effort has been dedicated to understanding their statistical properties or relating them to existing models of legislative behavior. I show how a common use of cohesion scores, testing for distinct voting blocs, is severely biased towar…
Who Gives, Who Receives, and Who Wins: Transforming Capital Into Political Change Through Nongovernmental Organizations
How does international support for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) lead to political change in the developing world? Massive amounts of domestic government spending and international aid are now distributed through NGOs instead of state bureaucracies. Recent scholarship suggests that this decentralization of developmental aid to NGOs has unintended political effects on recipient communities, but the mechanisms driving political effects are u…
Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters
Using NES surveys from 1980 through 2000, this article examines the incumbency advantage with a series of survey reports of the vote, an approach that departs from the convention of estimating the incumbent advantage with aggregate election returns. Previous work conceptualizes the incumbency advantage as a small and stable vote bonus of six to eight percentage points since about 1970, based on aggregate electoral returns. This study provides a d…
The Long-Term Impact of Mobilization and Repression on Political Trust
Authoritarian regimes respond to threatening student movements with repression and censorship. In many cases, failed movements are effectively erased from public memory. Do such movements affect long-term attitudes? We use a survey of college graduates to measure the impact of a failed student movement. Some of our respondents began college immediately before a major protest; others started after the movement had been suppressed. Using a fuzzy re…
Left Turn on Green: The Unintended Consequences of International Funding for Sustainable Development in Brazil
This article presents the first attempt to examine the political consequences of internationally funded programs that target local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although the purported mission of NGOs is often economic, humanitarian, or environmental, the authors suggest that their impact is also profoundly political. Injections of international resources into underdeveloped, often clientelistic societies can fundamentally change the natur…
Paving the way to political change: Decentralization of development in the Brazilian Amazon
The participatory legacy of mobilization and repression: Evidence From a Student Movement
Studies of the participatory legacies of social movements in democratic settings often find that the individuals who take part in these movements remain more likely to engage in politics, decades later. What is the participatory legacy of social movements in authoritarian regimes, where they are often repressed and erased from public memory? Understanding such impacts is challenging due to self-selection and severe censorship. In this paper, we a…
NGOs, Turnout, and the Left: A Sub-national Analysis of Brazil
This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community’s level of …
The Partisan Consequences of Majority-Minority Redistricting in the South, 1992 and 1994
This paper demonstrates that the creation of majority-minority districts was no more than an indirect cause of Democratic losses in 1992 and 1994, and the second-order effect of losing familiar voters was more important than the first-order effect of a reduced black constituency. Further, it demonstrates that a pro-GOP surge, independent of redistricting, was the critical factor without which neither new voters nor the reduced black population wo…
Legislative Politics in Authoritarian Brazil
This paper provides the first model of legislative behavior in nondemocratic settings. Many authoritarian regimes have sought to maintain a facade of democracy by creating “puppet” legislatures. These legislatures should always support the regime since uncooperative behavior risks career-ending punishments. But in spite of potentially high costs, legislators do sometimes rebel against military executives. I show how legislative rebellion can be a…
Left Turn on Green: The Unintended Consequences of International Funding for Sustainable Development in Brazil
This article presents the first attempt to examine the political consequences of internationally funded programs that target local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although the purported mission of NGOs is often economic, humanitarian, or environmental, the authors suggest that their impact is also profoundly political. Injections of international resources into underdeveloped, often clientelistic societies can fundamentally change the natur…
The Variable Incumbency Advantage: New Voters, Redistricting, and the Personal Vote
In this article we explore the personal vote costs of redistricting. After redistricting, incumbents often face significant numbers of new voters—voters that were previously in a different incumbent's district. Existing conceptualizations of the incumbency advantage suggest that the cost to incumbents of having new voters should be relatively small and predictable. We propose a different formulation: a variable incumbency advantage. We argue that…
Comparing Group and Subgroup Cohesion Scores: A Nonparametric Method with an Application to Brazil
This article builds a nonparametric method for inference from roll-call cohesion scores. Cohesion scores have been a staple of legislative studies since the publication of Rice's 1924 thesis. Unfortunately, little effort has been dedicated to understanding their statistical properties or relating them to existing models of legislative behavior. I show how a common use of cohesion scores, testing for distinct voting blocs, is severely biased towar…
Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters
Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict
The vast majority of what we know about building prospective electoral constituencies is confined to single-member district systems. However, most legislators are elected in multimember districts. Given that multiple incumbents represent the same voters, how do legislators decide whom they should target as prospective constituents? We build a general model of this decision and test it with travel data for 100 legislators elected in a single, nati…
Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters
Using NES surveys from 1980 through 2000, this article examines the incumbency advantage with a series of survey reports of the vote, an approach that departs from the convention of estimating the incumbent advantage with aggregate election returns. Previous work conceptualizes the incumbency advantage as a small and stable vote bonus of six to eight percentage points since about 1970, based on aggregate electoral returns. This study provides a d…
The Impact of Federalism on National Party Cohesion in Brazil
This article explores the impact of federalism on national party cohesion. Although credited with increasing economic growth and managing conflict in countries with diverse electorates, federal forms of government have also been blamed for weak party systems because national coalitions may be divided by interstate conflicts. This latter notion has been widely asserted, but there is virtually no empirical evidence of the relationship or even an ef…
Correcting for Small Group Inflation of Roll-Call Cohesion Scores
Roll-call cohesion scores are the most widely used measures of voting blocs in legislative studies, appearing in literally hundreds of studies since their introduction in 1924. Despite a staple of legislative studies, we know virtually nothing about the statistical properties of these scores. In this article, it is shown how such scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties, especially those that are le…
Paving the way to political change: Decentralization of development in the Brazilian Amazon
The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies
In this paper, I reexamine the impact of electoral institutions on legislative party organization. A long-running theme in comparative politics is that Brazil's political party system is weakened by the structure of its electoral institutions. I revisit this research by comparing legislative parties in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with those in the Brazilian Senate. This comparison allows me to control for political history, constituents, an…
Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies
Party switching by legislators has been common in many countries, including the Philippines, Italy, Nepal, Ecuador, Russia, and Japan. While frequently dismissed as simply an indicator of a weak parties, switching provides a unique window on party systems. To the extent that we understand affiliation decisions, we gain insight on the way politicians use parties to advance their careers. In this article I offer a model of party‐membership patterns…
Promoting and Preventing Political Change Through Internationally Funded NGO Activity
A growing percentage of international aid is distributed through local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Scholarship is divided on how that aid affects domestic politics. One side argues that aid to NGOs reinforces the status quo. As NGOs become dependent on external funding, they lose sight of their original goals. The other side contends that channeling funds to NGOs generates associational activity, producing political change by empowering…
Who Gives, Who Receives, and Who Wins: Transforming Capital Into Political Change Through Nongovernmental Organizations
How does international support for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) lead to political change in the developing world? Massive amounts of domestic government spending and international aid are now distributed through NGOs instead of state bureaucracies. Recent scholarship suggests that this decentralization of developmental aid to NGOs has unintended political effects on recipient communities, but the mechanisms driving political effects are u…
Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates …
NGOs, Turnout, and the Left: A Sub-national Analysis of Brazil
This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community’s level of …
The Long-Term Impact of Mobilization and Repression on Political Trust
Authoritarian regimes respond to threatening student movements with repression and censorship. In many cases, failed movements are effectively erased from public memory. Do such movements affect long-term attitudes? We use a survey of college graduates to measure the impact of a failed student movement. Some of our respondents began college immediately before a major protest; others started after the movement had been suppressed. Using a fuzzy re…
The participatory legacy of mobilization and repression: Evidence From a Student Movement
Studies of the participatory legacies of social movements in democratic settings often find that the individuals who take part in these movements remain more likely to engage in politics, decades later. What is the participatory legacy of social movements in authoritarian regimes, where they are often repressed and erased from public memory? Understanding such impacts is challenging due to self-selection and severe censorship. In this paper, we a…
Political science (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Demographic economics (6 works) · Legislature (6 works)