Book Project

My book manuscript, “Short-Circuited Representation: Social Networks and Indigenous Party Building in Latin America,” examines how social network structures condition indigenous groups’ party building outcomes across the Andean region. The study focuses on three core social network properties–rootedness, reach, and resilience–that constrain new parties’ pathways to expansion and opportunities for consolidation.

The project is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Andean region and draws from over 150 interviews with movement leaders and politicians, elite surveys with members of the Peruvian legislature, and an original network dataset tracing organizational ties in Bolivia. It contributes to literatures on ethnoracial representation and party formation by revealing the central mechanisms through which social organizations influence the process of representation building and accounting for why successful party building is a remarkably rare outcome even where strong social organizations abound.

An article based on this project has been published at the American Political Science Review.