Isabela Mares
Biographic Data
| ID | 217979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isabela Mares |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isabela |
| FAMILY NAME | Mares |
| SIGNATURE | MARES I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8315-9708 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 611 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Conditional Humanitarianism
Economic sanctions are a critical tool of international diplomacy. Existing scholarship shows that citizens in democratic sender states value sanctions that are effective in producing policy concessions. However, they also seek to limit the adverse humanitarian consequences of sanction imposition. How do citizens trade off these objectives against each other? We develop a theory of sanctions preferences where citizens (1) value policy concessions…
Electoral Rules, Programmatic Competition, and Redistribution
This study leverages the adoption and subsequent abandonment of proportional representation in interwar France to examine how electoral systems shape politicians’ incentives to engage in programmatic redistribution. Using novel data on the legislative initiatives and manifesto commitments of members of France’s Chamber of Deputies, we compare politicians against themselves under different electoral rules. We find that politicians devote more effo…
Compensation, Beliefs in State Intervention, and Support for the Energy Transition
Transitioning away from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources is one key lever through which countries can mitigate climate change. Governments have implemented interventionist policies that simultaneously seek to promote a transition to greener energy sources and shield producers and consumers from the costs of this change. We examine the impact of this enhanced role of the state on public opinion about environmental reforms. Using data f…
Defending Parliament Responses of Mainstream Parties to Parliamentary Erosion
Historically, extremist parties have engaged in a process of parliamentary disruption, violating the rules of interaction and slowing down the lawmaking process. How can democratic parties respond and counter parliamentary erosion? I propose a typology of the policies of parliamentary defense that includes targeting individual politicians and collective responses that change parliamentary or electoral rules. I explore the demand of political part…
Risk and demand for social protection in an era of populism
Economic and health crises have profound political consequences for public support for social policy, historically setting in motion a massive expansion of governmental programs. Is demand for social protection likely to increase among citizens exposed to risk in an era in which populist messages are prominent? We show that this depends critically on the precise targets that populists evoke as enemies of the people. We distinguish between two typ…
Protecting the Ballot
Between 1850 and 1918, many first-wave democracies in Europe adopted electoral reforms that reduced the incidence of electoral malfeasance. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary deliberations and roll-call votes in France, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, this book explores how these electoral changes came about. Reforms limiting electoral malfeasance came in a variety of forms. Some reforms imposed harsher punishments for bribing or the …
Protecting the Ballot
Fiscal innovation in nondemocratic regimes
Voting for the lesser evil
In many elections around the world, voters choose between politicians who differ not only in personal background and policy promises, but also in their history of dishonest electoral conduct. While recent literature has begun to investigate the conditions under which voters punish electoral malfeasance, we know relatively little about whether they penalize different forms of illicit activities carried out by politicians differently. In this paper…
Conditionality & Coercion
In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the “wrong” way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can po…
Varieties of Clientelism in Hungarian Elections
Menus of Electoral Irregularities
In many recent democracies, candidates seek to mobilize voters using a combination of clientelistic promises and coercive strategies.How pernicious do such infringements on voters’ electoral autonomy appear if one compares national elections in Imperial Germany to elections in other recent democracies? In this contribution, I examine how the “menu of electoral irregularities” one encounters in German national elections between 1870 and 1912 diffe…
Economic Intimidation in Contemporary Elections
This article examines electoral intimidation of voters at their workplace in contemporary new democracies. What is the relative importance of workplace intimidation in the broader portfolio of clientelistic strategies used by politicians at times of elections? What explains the subnational variation in the incidence of this electoral strategy? We answer these questions using empirical evidence from two East European countries – Romania and Bulgar…
The Core Voter’s Curse
In elections around the world, voters are influenced not only by positive offers of gifts and favors but also by the threat of negative sanctions for their individual electoral choices. Preelectoral entitlements such as jobs, assets, and welfare create expectations of future access that brokers can use as powerful negative inducements at the moment of the vote. We argue that in conditions where ballot secrecy makes it difficult to monitor vote ch…
A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels' Democracy for Realists
Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be cent…
Response to David J. Samuels and Ben W. Ansell’s review of From Open Secrets to Secret Voting
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Pressure, Favours, and Vote-buying
This article examines the mix of non-programmatic strategies used by politicians to gain voter support in contemporary Eastern Europe. We use a mixed-method design that combines survey-based experiments and qualitative research in a paired comparison of localities in Romania and Bulgaria. Our article documents that the mix of clientelistic strategies differs across localities with different turnover rates. In both Romania and Bulgaria, we find th…
Unfinished Business
This article explains legislators’ support for electoral reforms reducing electoral irregularities and protecting voters’ autonomy at the ballot box in Britain and Germany in the late 19th century. We argue that the main political cleavage over the adoption of new legislation to limit illicit electoral practices pitted politicians able to take advantage of opportunities for vote buying and intimidation against those who could not do so because of…
Redefining Who’s ‘In’ and Who’s ‘Out’
How does welfare state expansion reconfigure political coalitions? This paper challenges traditional accounts that pit social policy ‘insiders’, who univocally oppose policy expansion, against ‘outsiders’ who favour it. It argues that labour market vulnerability and partisan cues can play a critical role in shaping the preferences of both insiders and outsiders, and thus produce new pro-expansion coalitions. To test this claim, it employs histori…
Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes
In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different …
From Open Secrets to Secret Voting
The expansion of suffrage and the introduction of elections are momentous political changes that represent only the first steps in the process of democratization. In the absence of institutions that protect the electoral autonomy of voters against a range of actors who seek to influence voting decisions, political rights can be just hollow promises. This book examines the adoption of electoral reforms that protected the autonomy of voters during …
The Production of Electoral Intimidation
The Non-Democratic Origins of Income Taxation
This article examines the adoption of income taxes in Western economies since the 19th century. We identify two empirical regularities that challenge predictions of existing models of taxation and redistribution: While countries with low levels of electoral enfranchisement and high levels of landholding inequality adopt the income tax first, countries with more extensive electoral rules lag behind in adopting these new forms of taxation. We propo…
Explaining the 'Return of the State' in Middle-Income Countries
In recent decades, developing and middle-income countries around the globe have adopted path-breaking reforms to their social protection systems. Latin America has been a pioneer region, expanding the state's commitment on behalf of low-income citizens in key policy areas in many countries. This paper undertakes two tasks. First, it documents the surprising extension of noncontributory social protection policies across many Latin American countri…
The Adoption of Proportional Representation
The debate between economic and political explanations of the adoption of proportional representation (PR) has yielded mixed results. We reexamine this debate and argue that one has to take the different levels on which the causal mechanisms are located into account. This leads to a novel reformulation of Rokkan's hypotheses: we claim that PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when their parties expect to ga…
Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes
In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different …
Social Policy in Developing Countries
Drawing on recent work and data on social protection in the developing world, this essay evaluates the current state of the art and suggests several important new lines of research. We first examine the historical origin and evolution of social protection systems in developing countries, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the authoritarian roots of developing nations' social policy. As a preliminary effort to remedy this shortco…
The Non-Democratic Origins of Income Taxation
This article examines the adoption of income taxes in Western economies since the 19th century. We identify two empirical regularities that challenge predictions of existing models of taxation and redistribution: While countries with low levels of electoral enfranchisement and high levels of landholding inequality adopt the income tax first, countries with more extensive electoral rules lag behind in adopting these new forms of taxation. We propo…
The Core Voter’s Curse
In elections around the world, voters are influenced not only by positive offers of gifts and favors but also by the threat of negative sanctions for their individual electoral choices. Preelectoral entitlements such as jobs, assets, and welfare create expectations of future access that brokers can use as powerful negative inducements at the moment of the vote. We argue that in conditions where ballot secrecy makes it difficult to monitor vote ch…
Social Protection Around the World
This article develops and tests a political model specifying the conditions under which external risk leads to the introduction of redistributive social policies and argues that external risk sharpens a domestic political cleavage over the design of institutions of social insurance. Workers in sectors facing high volatility of income will support the introduction of social policies characterized by broad levels of insurance coverage and high redi…
The Sources of Business Interest in Social Insurance
When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers during various employment-related risks? The analysis developed in this article challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development, which are premised on the assumption that business opposes social insurance. The article examines the conditions under which self-interested, profit-maximizing firms support the in…
The Adoption of Proportional Representation
The debate between economic and political explanations of the adoption of proportional representation (PR) has yielded mixed results. We reexamine this debate and argue that one has to take the different levels on which the causal mechanisms are located into account. This leads to a novel reformulation of Rokkan's hypotheses: we claim that PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when their parties expect to ga…
Voting for the lesser evil
In many elections around the world, voters choose between politicians who differ not only in personal background and policy promises, but also in their history of dishonest electoral conduct. While recent literature has begun to investigate the conditions under which voters punish electoral malfeasance, we know relatively little about whether they penalize different forms of illicit activities carried out by politicians differently. In this paper…
Economic Intimidation in Contemporary Elections
This article examines electoral intimidation of voters at their workplace in contemporary new democracies. What is the relative importance of workplace intimidation in the broader portfolio of clientelistic strategies used by politicians at times of elections? What explains the subnational variation in the incidence of this electoral strategy? We answer these questions using empirical evidence from two East European countries – Romania and Bulgar…
Coalitional realignment and the adoption of non-contributory social insurance programmes in Latin America
What explains the recent rise in non-contributory social insurance programmes in Latin America? Since the 1990s, Latin American countries have enacted significant social policy reforms that have supplemented contributory insurance policies with new or expanded non-contributory programmes, financed by general tax revenues. We present a political explanation for this phenomenon, arguing that the process of deindustrialization, and especially the in…
Explaining the 'Return of the State' in Middle-Income Countries
In recent decades, developing and middle-income countries around the globe have adopted path-breaking reforms to their social protection systems. Latin America has been a pioneer region, expanding the state's commitment on behalf of low-income citizens in key policy areas in many countries. This paper undertakes two tasks. First, it documents the surprising extension of noncontributory social protection policies across many Latin American countri…
Varieties of Clientelism in Hungarian Elections
Strategic Alliances and Social Policy Reform
The Production of Electoral Intimidation
Labor Shortages, Rural Inequality, and Democratization
A large body of scholarship has asserted that inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets act as a barrier to democratic transitions. This article proposes a theoretical and empirical amendment of this finding, by arguing that employment conditions in the countryside, rather than inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets affected electoral outcomes in societies characterized by high levels of rural inequality. Using empirical evidence…
Economic Insecurity and Social Policy Expansion
What is the impact of economic insecurity on the development of institutions of social insurance? Existing studies have examined this question by exploring the impact of various measures of economic volatility on aggregate government expenditures or revenues. These aggregate data are, however, an imperfect proxy of the character of institutions of social protection. To overcome the limitations of earlier studies, this article explores the conditi…
Fiscal innovation in nondemocratic regimes
The economic consequences of the welfare state
What are the economic and employment consequences of larger social insurance programmes? Are larger welfare states diverting resources from economic activity and distorting the investment decisions of firms? I examine theoretical and empirical research on the economic consequences of the welfare state. This review shows that the predictions of a negative relationship between higher levels of social protection and growth have not been borne out in…
Pressure, Favours, and Vote-buying
This article examines the mix of non-programmatic strategies used by politicians to gain voter support in contemporary Eastern Europe. We use a mixed-method design that combines survey-based experiments and qualitative research in a paired comparison of localities in Romania and Bulgaria. Our article documents that the mix of clientelistic strategies differs across localities with different turnover rates. In both Romania and Bulgaria, we find th…
Wage Bargaining in the Presence of Social Services and Transfers
OECD economies were able to reconcile the pursuit of welfare state expansion and full employment during the first decades of the postwar period. Yet the trade-off between these two policy objectives widened in recent decades. To explore the question ofwhy this change occurred, this article extends familiar models of wage determination by adding a number of parameters that capture cross-national differences among welfare states. The model identifi…
Is Unemployment Insurable? Employers and the Development of Unemployment Insurance
In order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ pol…
Unfinished Business
This article explains legislators’ support for electoral reforms reducing electoral irregularities and protecting voters’ autonomy at the ballot box in Britain and Germany in the late 19th century. We argue that the main political cleavage over the adoption of new legislation to limit illicit electoral practices pitted politicians able to take advantage of opportunities for vote buying and intimidation against those who could not do so because of…
Enterprise Reorganization and Social Insurance Reform
What explains the decline in the labor force participation rates of elderly workers at the end of their working lives? Why have governments been unable to revert towards early exit from the labor market? This paper provides an actor‐centered analysis of the development of early retirement, highlighting the political negotiation among unions, employers, and governments over the distribution of the costs of these measures and the division of contro…
Risk and demand for social protection in an era of populism
Economic and health crises have profound political consequences for public support for social policy, historically setting in motion a massive expansion of governmental programs. Is demand for social protection likely to increase among citizens exposed to risk in an era in which populist messages are prominent? We show that this depends critically on the precise targets that populists evoke as enemies of the people. We distinguish between two typ…
Compensation, Beliefs in State Intervention, and Support for the Energy Transition
Transitioning away from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources is one key lever through which countries can mitigate climate change. Governments have implemented interventionist policies that simultaneously seek to promote a transition to greener energy sources and shield producers and consumers from the costs of this change. We examine the impact of this enhanced role of the state on public opinion about environmental reforms. Using data f…
Is Unemployment Insurable? Employers and the Development of Unemployment Insurance
In order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ pol…
Strategic Alliances and Social Policy Reform
Firms and the Welfare State
When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers for various employment‐related risks in the areas of unemployment insurance, accident insurance, and early retirement? This paper challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development premised on the assumption of business opposition to social insurance. It examines the conditions under which firms support the int…
Enterprise Reorganization and Social Insurance Reform
What explains the decline in the labor force participation rates of elderly workers at the end of their working lives? Why have governments been unable to revert towards early exit from the labor market? This paper provides an actor‐centered analysis of the development of early retirement, highlighting the political negotiation among unions, employers, and governments over the distribution of the costs of these measures and the division of contro…
The Sources of Business Interest in Social Insurance
When and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers during various employment-related risks? The analysis developed in this article challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development, which are premised on the assumption that business opposes social insurance. The article examines the conditions under which self-interested, profit-maximizing firms support the in…
Economic Insecurity and Social Policy Expansion
What is the impact of economic insecurity on the development of institutions of social insurance? Existing studies have examined this question by exploring the impact of various measures of economic volatility on aggregate government expenditures or revenues. These aggregate data are, however, an imperfect proxy of the character of institutions of social protection. To overcome the limitations of earlier studies, this article explores the conditi…
Wage Bargaining in the Presence of Social Services and Transfers
OECD economies were able to reconcile the pursuit of welfare state expansion and full employment during the first decades of the postwar period. Yet the trade-off between these two policy objectives widened in recent decades. To explore the question ofwhy this change occurred, this article extends familiar models of wage determination by adding a number of parameters that capture cross-national differences among welfare states. The model identifi…
Social Protection Around the World
This article develops and tests a political model specifying the conditions under which external risk leads to the introduction of redistributive social policies and argues that external risk sharpens a domestic political cleavage over the design of institutions of social insurance. Workers in sectors facing high volatility of income will support the introduction of social policies characterized by broad levels of insurance coverage and high redi…
Taxation, Wage Bargaining, and Unemployment
Why were European economies able to pursue the simultaneous commitment to full employment and welfare state expansion during the first decades of the postwar period and why did this virtuous relationship break down during recent decades? This book provides an answer to this question, by highlighting the critical importance of a political exchange between unions and governments, premised on wage moderation in exchange for the expansion of social s…
The economic consequences of the welfare state
What are the economic and employment consequences of larger social insurance programmes? Are larger welfare states diverting resources from economic activity and distorting the investment decisions of firms? I examine theoretical and empirical research on the economic consequences of the welfare state. This review shows that the predictions of a negative relationship between higher levels of social protection and growth have not been borne out in…
The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State
Comparative research on the welfare state goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. As such, it is as old as the welfare state itself. Fabians looked for arguments on how to help the poor and also minimize distortions from state interventions. In Germany, Kathedersozialisten such as Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner searched for policy instruments that could lift citizens out of poverty while cementing their allegiance to the prevailing political…
The Welfare State in Global Perspective
This article studies the welfare state in a global perspective. It argues that the most exciting research opportunities in the study of welfare lie in examining the variation in the politics of social protection in developing economies. It identifies the levels of industrialization and economic openness and views the power resource perspective. Cross-class alliances and state-centered approaches are examined. This article shows that existing lite…
Social Policy in Developing Countries
Drawing on recent work and data on social protection in the developing world, this essay evaluates the current state of the art and suggests several important new lines of research. We first examine the historical origin and evolution of social protection systems in developing countries, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the authoritarian roots of developing nations' social policy. As a preliminary effort to remedy this shortco…
Measuring the Individual-Level Determinants of Social Insurance Preferences
This study employs an original, nationally representative survey of citizens in Argentina to understand the economic and political factors that shape individual-level preferences for social insurance. In the past two decades, Latin American democracies have undergone significant changes in their social welfare institutions, in some cases dramatically reversing course from previous policies. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how and wh…
The Adoption of Proportional Representation
The debate between economic and political explanations of the adoption of proportional representation (PR) has yielded mixed results. We reexamine this debate and argue that one has to take the different levels on which the causal mechanisms are located into account. This leads to a novel reformulation of Rokkan's hypotheses: we claim that PR is introduced when legislators face strong district-level competition and when their parties expect to ga…
Labor Shortages, Rural Inequality, and Democratization
A large body of scholarship has asserted that inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets act as a barrier to democratic transitions. This article proposes a theoretical and empirical amendment of this finding, by arguing that employment conditions in the countryside, rather than inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets affected electoral outcomes in societies characterized by high levels of rural inequality. Using empirical evidence…
Coalitional realignment and the adoption of non-contributory social insurance programmes in Latin America
What explains the recent rise in non-contributory social insurance programmes in Latin America? Since the 1990s, Latin American countries have enacted significant social policy reforms that have supplemented contributory insurance policies with new or expanded non-contributory programmes, financed by general tax revenues. We present a political explanation for this phenomenon, arguing that the process of deindustrialization, and especially the in…
From Open Secrets to Secret Voting
The expansion of suffrage and the introduction of elections are momentous political changes that represent only the first steps in the process of democratization. In the absence of institutions that protect the electoral autonomy of voters against a range of actors who seek to influence voting decisions, political rights can be just hollow promises. This book examines the adoption of electoral reforms that protected the autonomy of voters during …
The Production of Electoral Intimidation
The Non-Democratic Origins of Income Taxation
This article examines the adoption of income taxes in Western economies since the 19th century. We identify two empirical regularities that challenge predictions of existing models of taxation and redistribution: While countries with low levels of electoral enfranchisement and high levels of landholding inequality adopt the income tax first, countries with more extensive electoral rules lag behind in adopting these new forms of taxation. We propo…
Explaining the 'Return of the State' in Middle-Income Countries
In recent decades, developing and middle-income countries around the globe have adopted path-breaking reforms to their social protection systems. Latin America has been a pioneer region, expanding the state's commitment on behalf of low-income citizens in key policy areas in many countries. This paper undertakes two tasks. First, it documents the surprising extension of noncontributory social protection policies across many Latin American countri…
Redefining Who’s ‘In’ and Who’s ‘Out’
How does welfare state expansion reconfigure political coalitions? This paper challenges traditional accounts that pit social policy ‘insiders’, who univocally oppose policy expansion, against ‘outsiders’ who favour it. It argues that labour market vulnerability and partisan cues can play a critical role in shaping the preferences of both insiders and outsiders, and thus produce new pro-expansion coalitions. To test this claim, it employs histori…
Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes
In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different …
A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels' Democracy for Realists
Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be cent…
Response to David J. Samuels and Ben W. Ansell’s review of From Open Secrets to Secret Voting
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (35 works) · Economics (33 works) · Politics (31 works) · Law (25 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Market economy (16 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works)