ABOUT
I am Catarina, a 5th-year Political Science Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego. I am broadly interested in Political Economy and Comparative Politics, with a regional focus on Latin America. My dissertation, provisionally titled Artificial Participation: The Hidden Costs of Compulsory Voting , revolves around the relationship between democratic competition and compulsory voting laws. I am motivated by the challenges democracies face by design, such as low and unequal participation and disproportional representation.
CV
RESEARCH
Peer-Reviewed Research
Freire, D., Mignozzetti, U., Roman, C., & Alptekin, H. (2023). The effect of legislature size on public spending: A meta-analysis. British Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 776-788.
Baracho, L. F., Roman, C., França, G. T., Favalle, F. B., Sacramento, C. D. D., & Fernandes, I. F. (2023). Brazilian foreign policy in the press: an exploratory study on the framing of the main Brazilian newspapers. Revista de Sociologia e Política, 31, e010.
Working Papers
Delaying Democracy: Why Autocrats Introduce Compulsory Voting
Compulsory Voting and Incumbency Advantage: Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities
Forced Participation and Mobilization Campaigning: Does Compulsory Voting Reduce the Role of Money in Politics?
The Cost of Electoral Abstention: Entrepreneurship and Compulsory Voting in Brazil
TEACHING
Computational Social Science
Instructor
Instructor in Introduction to Programming for Computational Social Sciences (CSS 1 at UCSD), Spring and Summer 2025
Workshops
Latex Crash Course
This is the code and material for an invited talk at the 2023 Fall Computational Social Science Seminar at UC San Diego.
RMarkdown + git Crash Course
This is a mini-course I offered as a part of the training fellowship promoted by the Brazil, the Americas, and the World research group, funded by The São Paulo Research Foundation. Below are the two 1-hour sessions offered in Portuguese, on February 15th and 22nd, 2021.
Political Science
Instructor
Instructor in Comparative Politics of Latin America (POLI 134AA at UCSD), Summer 2025
Co-Instructor in Introduction to Comparative Politics (POLI 11D at UCSD), Summer 2024
Teaching Assistant
See CV for details.
PROJECTS
Natural Resources and Policy Choices in Latin America
Natural Resources and Policy Choices in Latin America is the product of a collaboration between Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and the editors Giovanna França, Dr Danilo Freire, and Prof Umberto Mignozzetti.
In this project, I was a research assistant and took active part in all steps of the writing and editing process.
Below, you will find a .pdf copy of the book. I hope you enjoy the reading!