Bio

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I study judicial politics and democratic backsliding, with a focus on how courts defend their independence when elected leaders turn against them. My dissertation asks how constitutional courts respond to sustained populist attacks, and how that response helps them hold. I develop this argument through the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, tracing its behaviour from redemocratization to the present, with Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency as the central case. More broadly, I am interested in public opinion toward courts, and the institutional foundations of democratic resilience in Latin America. I also have a strong interest in the politics of religion and in the study of the determinants of electoral behaviour, examining how evangelical churches shape vote choice and electoral outcomes in Brazil.

Methodologically, I work mostly with survey experiments and observational causal inference, usually on data I collect myself.

Before the PhD, I trained and worked as a lawyer in Brazil. I hold a PhD in Law from the University of Brasília, an LL.M. from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and an LL.B. from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, and I served for over five years as a legal advisor in the Brazilian Air Force, including as counsel to the Chief Commander’s Office. My research has appeared in the Journal of Politics in Latin America and the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and has been supported by grants from APSA, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and UW–Madison.

I work with Nils Ringe as my advisor. At UW–Madison I coordinate the Methods, Experiments, and Data (MEAD) Workshop and serve as a project assistant for Lawyers and Democratic Decline at the Law School.