Valentín Figueroa
Biographic Data
| ID | 3846033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Valentín Figueroa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Valentín |
| FAMILY NAME | Figueroa |
| SIGNATURE | FIGUEROA V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5835-0263 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Oppression Beyond Plantations: The Effect of Emancipation on Incarceration in Urban Buenos Aires
Agglomeration and creativity in early modern Britain
The Inquisition and the decline of science in Spain
Does Proportionality Increase Turnout? A Study of Adaptation to Oscillating Electoral Systems
Does proportionality increase turnout? This article studies a national electoral reform in early twentieth-century Argentina that was implemented asymmetrically across districts, creating a natural laboratory in which some districts oscillated between electoral systems across elections. Leveraging this unusual variation in a difference-in-differences design, this article shows that a shift from multi-member plurality rules towards a slightly more…
The Opposite of Containment: Electoral System Change in Argentina's 1912 Democratic Transition
The traditional narrative of Europe's first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class parties to contain. I study Argentina'…
The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy
After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixte…
Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal
Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two…
Electoral Proximity and the Political Involvement of Bureaucrats: A Natural Experiment in Argentina, 1904
In this paper, I use a slightly modified version of the Becker–Stigler model of corrupt behavior to explain bureaucratic political involvement. Since bureaucrats prefer higher rewards and not to support losing candidates, we expect them to become politically involved near elections – when rewards are expected to be higher, and information more abundant. Taking advantage of a natural experiment, I employ differences-in-means and differences-in-dif…
The Capital Mistake: Local Information and National Electoral Reforms
Electoral reforms are often portrayed as strategic decisions by rational actors. However, expectations about the electoral consequences of reforms are not always realized ex post. I argue that these strategic mistakes occur because of information failures. Even though electoral reforms are decided at a national level, electoral information is geographically concentrated at a local level, where elections take place. At the time of reforms, members…
Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal
Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two…
Does Proportionality Increase Turnout? A Study of Adaptation to Oscillating Electoral Systems
Does proportionality increase turnout? This article studies a national electoral reform in early twentieth-century Argentina that was implemented asymmetrically across districts, creating a natural laboratory in which some districts oscillated between electoral systems across elections. Leveraging this unusual variation in a difference-in-differences design, this article shows that a shift from multi-member plurality rules towards a slightly more…
Electoral Proximity and the Political Involvement of Bureaucrats: A Natural Experiment in Argentina, 1904
In this paper, I use a slightly modified version of the Becker–Stigler model of corrupt behavior to explain bureaucratic political involvement. Since bureaucrats prefer higher rewards and not to support losing candidates, we expect them to become politically involved near elections – when rewards are expected to be higher, and information more abundant. Taking advantage of a natural experiment, I employ differences-in-means and differences-in-dif…
The Inquisition and the decline of science in Spain
The Opposite of Containment: Electoral System Change in Argentina's 1912 Democratic Transition
The traditional narrative of Europe's first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class parties to contain. I study Argentina'…
The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy
After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixte…
The Capital Mistake: Local Information and National Electoral Reforms
Electoral reforms are often portrayed as strategic decisions by rational actors. However, expectations about the electoral consequences of reforms are not always realized ex post. I argue that these strategic mistakes occur because of information failures. Even though electoral reforms are decided at a national level, electoral information is geographically concentrated at a local level, where elections take place. At the time of reforms, members…
Electoral Proximity and the Political Involvement of Bureaucrats: A Natural Experiment in Argentina, 1904
In this paper, I use a slightly modified version of the Becker–Stigler model of corrupt behavior to explain bureaucratic political involvement. Since bureaucrats prefer higher rewards and not to support losing candidates, we expect them to become politically involved near elections – when rewards are expected to be higher, and information more abundant. Taking advantage of a natural experiment, I employ differences-in-means and differences-in-dif…
Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal
Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two…
The Protestant Road to Bureaucracy
After the seventeenth century, rulers across Europe attempted reforms to replace amateur administrators with professional bureaucrats. The success of administrative reforms hinged on whether rulers could compensate entrenched officeholders and recruit salaried employees. The author demonstrates that the extent to which these conditions were met at the time of reforms depended on whether states had experienced a Protestant Reformation in the sixte…
Oppression Beyond Plantations: The Effect of Emancipation on Incarceration in Urban Buenos Aires
Agglomeration and creativity in early modern Britain
The Inquisition and the decline of science in Spain
Does Proportionality Increase Turnout? A Study of Adaptation to Oscillating Electoral Systems
Does proportionality increase turnout? This article studies a national electoral reform in early twentieth-century Argentina that was implemented asymmetrically across districts, creating a natural laboratory in which some districts oscillated between electoral systems across elections. Leveraging this unusual variation in a difference-in-differences design, this article shows that a shift from multi-member plurality rules towards a slightly more…
The Opposite of Containment: Electoral System Change in Argentina's 1912 Democratic Transition
The traditional narrative of Europe's first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class parties to contain. I study Argentina'…
Economics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (4 works) · Democracy (3 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (3 works) · Public Administration (3 works)