Dissertation Project
Three Essays on Gender, Violence, and the State
My dissertation explicates and assesses the historical role of gender-based violence on state development to then explore its political consequences on women’s electoral turnout, protest mobilization, and public service and justice preferences. The first paper of my dissertation, “The Historical Origins of the Gendered State and its Contemporary Implications: Theory and Evidence from Mexico,” begins by assessing the historic role of gender-based violence on state development. In this paper, I develop a framework that identifies when and how gender-based violence has been key to the development and persistence of modern states. In the second paper of my dissertation, “Gender-Based Violence, Institutional Revictimization, and Women’s Political Participation,” I evaluate the effect of GBV by leveraging a fine-grained dataset based on 1.5 million municipal-level crime reports, electoral turnout, and protest events and responses from an original survey in Mexico. I demonstrate that GBV has a significant and distinct impact on women’s political participation—municipalities with higher rates of GBV are associated with lower rates of women’s formal political participation (voting) but higher rates of women’s informal political participation (women’s protests). I then examine 60 semi-structured interviews with personnel involved in the justice-seeking process across Mexico. Building inductively, I develop a theory of institutional revictimization by state actors to account for women’s divergent political behavior. These findings contribute to our understanding of how GBV shapes political behavior and uncover hidden gender inequalities within institutions. In the third paper of my dissertation, “Justice Provision in Gendered Settings: Evidence from Mexico,” I examine the impact of gender-based violence on individual’s attitudes towards justice. Prior scholarship has examined laws and policies addressing gendered justice, women’s representation in the judiciary, and the promotion of women’s participation in justice processes, but less is known regarding individual’s preferences for justice following gender-based violence. I build on this work by examining how the (1) severity of gender-based violence, (2) gender, and (3) direct or indirect exposure to gender-based violence shapes support for punitive justice preferences. I utilize a mixed-methods approach that leverages in-depth interviews with justice providers and justice seekers and an original survey with an embedded vignette experiment (n = 1,226) that exposes respondents to different justice outcomes following gender-based violence, to examine individuals’ justice preferences in Mexico. The findings suggest that individuals, and specifically women and those with no direct or indirect exposure to gender-based violence, prefer harsher, more punitive justice outcomes following severe gender-based violence. My research contributes to scholarship on gender and the role of violence in shaping preferences for punitive justice.
My dissertation work has been supported by the following research initiatives:
American Political Science Association
Comparative Politics Section
Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section
Fund for Latino Scholarship
Minority Fellowship Program
Public Scholarship Program
Ralph Bunche Summer Institute
Women, Gender, & Politics Research Section
Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program Research Fellowship Program
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
The Empirical Study of Gender Research Network
University of California, San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies Visiting Fellowship Program
United States Institute of Peace & Minerva Research Initiative Peace and Security Fellowship Program