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Countries in the Global South are particularly vulnerable to social and political violence. This paper suggests that such violence makes certain recalcitrant economic interests more open to taxes and spending on social welfare. Using results from a survey experiment of business owners and operators in Mexico, we show that relative to more innocuous institutional weaknesses, concerns over violence generally increase support for anti-poverty spending and decrease support for tax cuts. To build a theory, we explore heterogeneous effects and textual data. The findings suggest that business interests see anti-poverty spending as a tool for shoring up costs of violence in consumer markets, with some leaders even extending support to welfare-enhancing taxes. However, violence can create challenges in labor markets that increase operational costs, leading some business interests to resist tax policies that ask them to help fund social programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does emigration affect tax preferences in migrant-sending countries? Experiencing public services in a high tax-capacity destination may reduce support for tax increases by throwing fiscal failure at home into stark relief (the socialization hypothesis). Alternatively, migrants' exclusion from certain public services may increase desire to fund these services in migrant origin countries (the exclusion hypothesis). We test these competing hypotheses with an online survey experiment in Mexico and explore variation in US healthcare access on fiscal policy preferences of migrant households. Migrant households, especially those with returned migrant members, are more supportive of taxation when tax revenue is earmarked for healthcare, a service to which many Mexican immigrants in the US lack access. It is migrants' exclusion from, rather than their socialization into, the fiscal contract in destination countries that influences fiscal policy preferences in their countries of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether corruption leads to the election of women and whether increased women's representation leads to lower levels of corruption are two questions with answers that remain uncertain and context-dependent. We explore the case of Mexico and theorize that three factors--gender stereotypes, demands for the inclusion of women, and expectations of accountability--condition the relationship between women's representation and corruption. We hypothesize that given the features of the Mexican system, revelations of corruption should lead to the election of women and women should not be less corrupt than men in office. Leveraging an original dataset of close to 20 years of municipal audits to mayors, we find supporting evidence. The occurrence of audits and recent revelations of corruption increase the likelihood of women being elected and municipalities led by women report no fewer irregularities as compared to those led by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the demand-and-supply dynamic of security policies. We argue there are two informational shortcuts through which voters process policy alternatives and choose among them: (1) their own personal experiences with violence and (2) candidates’ profiles. We test our argument through an original survey experiment conducted in Mexico. We model voters’ decisions to support candidates campaigning over a variety of security proposals. Our survey design takes advantage of recent developments in network models to better measure the effects of crime exposure on voters’ preferences. We find that higher exposure to crime victimization is associated with increased support for only some iron-fist policies, therefore highlighting the importance of unpacking security policies instead of generalizing the results of crime exposure. We show null effects of partisan advantages and reveal the role of non-partisan heuristics, such as the candidate’s professional experience, in preferences for security policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the consequences of the militarization of public safety? Governments increasingly rely on militaries for policing, but the systematic study of this phenomenon's consequences for human rights has been neglected. NGO and journalistic accounts point to widespread violations by the military, but these snapshots do not necessarily present evidence of systematic abuse. Based on unique data on military deployments and human rights complaints in Mexico, we conduct a systematic, country-wide study of the consequences of constabularization for human rights. Following matching and difference-in-difference strategies, we find that it leads to a 150% increase in complaints against federal security forces. We also leverage deployments for disaster-relief operations and complaints against non-security institutions to show that the increase is not due to underlying conditions or higher reporting in the military's presence. The findings have important implications for our understanding of quality of democracy and the democratic ideals of civilian policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do criminal actors publicly display threatening messages? Studies of organized crime emphasize that criminal actors rely on clandestine networks of influence. Subtle or coded threats are an effective means of extending that influence, but publicizing these threats appears to undermine their chief advantage. We argue that publicized threats broadcast an imagined order, delineating who has a place in society under criminal control, and who does not. To demonstrate this argument, we construct a "grammar of threat" and use this to analyze public threats broadcast by four criminal actors: two groups in Colombia and two in Mexico. The analysis demonstrates that every group projects an order through their threats, but that the order imagined varies by group. Some orders are more clearly ideological; some are more localized or more expansive. These findings highlight the important role of communication—distinct from but often combined with violence—in criminal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]