Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

Expert Bio

Cesar Zucco is Associate Professor at the Brazilian School of Business and Public Administration in the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. He previously served as Assistant Professor at Rutgers, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, and Oxford. His research examining the functioning of political institutions, several aspects political behavior at the elite and mass levels, as well as the politics of public policies has appeared in leading journals in Political Science and Latin American Studies. He is also the co-author of two books, The Volatility Curse (2020) and Partisans, Anti-Partisans and Non-Partisans: Voting Behavior in Brazil (2018), both published by Cambridge University Press.

Expertise

• Democracy
• Economics and Globalization
• Governance
• International Development
• Latin America
• Brazil

Wilson Center Project

Mitigating the Volatility Curse: How to deal with the political challenges of commodity dependency

Project Summary

Half of Latin America are commodity exporters and importers of capital and therefore deeply affected by economic conditions their governments cannot exert any control over. Voters are influenced by economic performance even though much of it does not depend on what incumbents do. This has deleterious effects on the functioning of democracy and on democratic accountability via elections. The project's two arms seek, respectively, to explore the link between economic volatility induced by exogenous factors and institutional weakness and to identify or develop policy instruments to cushion the effects of economic volatility on democratic accountability.

Major Publications

• "The Volatility Curse", Cambridge University Press 2020 (with D. Campello); https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108894975
• "Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans: Voting Behavior in Brazil", Cambridge University Press, 2018 (with D. Samuels). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108553742
• "Presidential Success and the World Economy'' The Journal of Politics, 78(2):589--602 (2016, with D. Campello); https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/684749