Agustina Haime, Ph.D.

agus.haime@gmail.com

Rice University

City: San Francisco, California

Country: United States

About Me:

I am a political scientist and researcher. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University in May of 2019. My dissertation examined the importance that parties have for voters in Latin America in three main aspects: as information shortcuts, as a form of social identity, and for keeping governments accountable. To test the main theory put forward by the study, I conducted web surveys with embedded conjoint experiments in Argentina and Mexico.

Research Interests

Comparative Political Institutions

Public Opinion

Representation and Electoral Systems

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Countries of Interest

Argentina

Chile

Brazil

Mexico

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2017) Measuring Knowledge of Parties Legislative Seat Shares, Political Science Research and Methods

We use two original surveys (including survey experiments) conducted the week before the 2015 elections in the Britain and Denmark to explore the best method for measuring individuals’ knowledge of the partisan distribution of legislative seats in multi-party democracies. The complete lack of such questions in the corpus of survey research on multi-party democracies is a testament to the skepticism that many survey researchers have about the feasibility of such complex questions. However, our analysis, which is the first empirical test of this skepticism, reveals little evidence of respondents’ frustration or high levels of non-cooperation with these questions. Additionally, our survey experiments, which examine the usefulness of different question formats, make it clear that such questions should be framed in terms of the numbers of seats each party holds rather than shares or percentages of seats.

(2017) What explains voter turnout in Latin America? A test of the effect of citizens’ attitudes towards the electoral process., Revista de Ciencia Politica

Research on electoral participation at the individual level in Latin America remains scarce. This article extends our knowledge about the individual-level factors that impact citizens’ propensity to vote in the region. Specifically, I assess the link between citizens’ trust in the electoral process and voter turnout using recent survey data from 19 Latin American countries between 2004 and 2014. Using logistic models I show that trust in the fairness of elections has a significant and positive effect on voter turnout across the region, and that this effect is mediated by the existence of compulsory voting laws.