Estimados Académicos y Académicas FEN,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Do protests induce accountabiliy? Evidence and theory from Brazil's 2013 mass protests".

Expone: Laura Karpuska, profesora asistente, Insper Business School.

Coautor: Helena Arruda, Amanda de Albuquerque y Claudio Ferraz.

Abstract: The effectiveness of mass street protests as an accountability mechanism remains uncertain, particularly concerning the quality of the messages produced and their subsequent impact. This paper empirically analyzes the effects of the large street protests in Brazil in 2013 on both voter and federal legislator behavior. Leveraging geolocated Twitter data, we construct two distinct measures: protest intensity and the quality of protesters’ demands at the municipal level, where quality refers to protesters articulating few and clear demands. Our findings provide causal evidence that more intense protests lead to higher levels of pork barrel spending, while protests with less focused demands negatively affect legislators’ responsiveness. Additionally, we find a negative causal impact of less focused protest demands on legislators’ vote share. However, legislators who responded to protest demands are less negatively impacted by protests. These results support the idea that protests can be effective political accountability mechanisms, as long as they have clear demands. Finally, our results can be interpreted within the framework of a noisy persuasion game between protesters and the government. Our model demonstrates that protests lacking clear demands and encountering a noisy communication channel not only achieve diminished success but can also be ex ante inefficient as mechanisms of persuasion. Intriguingly, noisy protests help differentiate politicians who address protesters’ demands from those who do not, thereby enhancing electoral accountability.

El formato será presencial y el seminario se desarrollará en la Sala P-204.

Ver publicación.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación