Government behaviour
This research area looks at how governments make different types of decisions. At the moment, it only shows my work on how democratic institutions use vote trading. However, I am also working in understanding how democratic governments influence media and vice versa. These works will be published here soon.
Quantifying vote trading through network reciprocity
Published on: 2016Our aim with this paper was to create the first method to estimate vote trading in congresses using roll call data. We develop a network approach and succeed at providing the first large-scale estimates of vote trading and validating our results with previous micro-level studies.
Media coverage shifts and policy overreactions
Published on: 2026There have been two competing schools of thoughts about how governments process information: serial and parallel processing. Serial processing implies that governments suffer from information-processing bottlenecks, and that may lead to erroneous decision-making. While much theory has been written in both schools of thought, no empirical test comparing them exists. In this paper, we collect extensive newspaper and government expenditure data to formally test both hypotheses. What is nice about this work is that we identified a natural experiment in Mexico where two consecutive earthquakes were geographically distant, produced roughly the same human and economic losses, but received differentiated media coverage. Under this setting, we show that the Mexican government overreacted in its expenditure decisions, favourably biasing the victims that received more media coverage.
Paying the piper
Published on: 2026In many countries around the world, governments cannot exercise outright censorship, so they need to resort to more subtle or sophisticated instruments to try to influence the media. We use sentiment analysis to measure the tone of opinion columns in all major Mexican newspapers and develop a method to measure how much the federal government influences such tone through its expenditure in publicity. The evidence is clear: more expenditure is associated with a favourable tone towards the government and a harsher tone towards the opposition. Furthermore, we validate our quantitative findings with qualitative evidence from a case study for which we also have extensive data on opinion tone and government spending.