Work-in-progress
Reach and Retrenchment of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest
* online first, American Journal of Sociology
ASA Environmental Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award
ASA Sociology of Development Graduate Student Paper Award
ASA Political Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award
How do states build and lose the capacity to decarbonize? By drawing on a comparative-historical analysis of Brazil’s drastic reduction and later resurgence of carbon dioxide emissions from 1985 to 2022, this article describes climate change as an emerging state-building domain with global and scientific dimensions. It uncovers a new pathway for decarbonization: domestic bureaucrats and national scientists build state capacity by leveraging transnational ties that provide shelter from politics and resources for policy experimentation. Over time, these ties help consolidate the infrastructural reach of decarbonization policies, but new policies conflict with economic elites’ interests. Opposing elites organize and stall implementation, but capacity remains in place due to a minimal agreement that decarbonization is a state responsibility. Democratic backsliding triggers the collapse of that agreement: opponents occupy the bureaucracy and erode the foundations of state capacity by targeting the global and scientific basis of decarbonization capacity.
Whose Merit, which Redistribution? Elites, Taxes, and Transfers in Brazil and South Africa [with Graziella Moraes Silva and Matias Lopez]
*Forthcoming, Social Forces
Scholarship finds that elites credit their own success to hard work and attribute poverty to laziness, which allows them to justify inequality and oppose redistribution. These accounts often treat two claims as mirrors: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We argue that these two components of merit constitute different dimensions, with varied implications for redistributive policies, such as taxation or direct transfers, and with different salience depending on national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa—comprised of random samples of CEOs, top-tier civil servants, and legislators—we examine whose merit matters for which types of redistribution. We find that elites in both countries are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort. Elites that perceive the poor as effortless are also less likely to support transfers to the poor. The two countries diverge in the role of elite merit in shaping support for taxation: in Brazil, perceiving elites as hard-working is associated with rejecting taxation policies, though these perceptions are confounded with ideology; in South Africa, only racial identification explains preferences for taxation policies. We conclude that the relationship between elite’s perceptions of merit and their redistributive preferences are contingent on whose merit is considered, which redistribution is considered, as well as which national repertoires of evaluation are available.
Qualitative Methods and the Digital Era: How computation entangles fieldwork?
*full draft available [here], under review.
Scholars writing about the interface between qualitative and computational methods have rightly focused on machine learning. But computation transforms qualitative fieldwork in quieter ways, through scrapping, parsing, optical character recognition, archiving, and zooming. This paper situates computational methods within a wider digital and argues that they entangle fieldwork spatially (by increasing its geographical reach), temporally (by accelerating research), and epistemically (by influencing what we can now). I show these kinds of entanglement by drawing on my own comparative-historical study of Brazil’s decarbonization capacities, which was conduct within a Ph.D. structured by COVID-19. Before the lockdown, fieldwork relied on direct observation and interviews with environmental fieldworkers and policymakers. During lockdown, computation provided continuity: web scraping, archival digitization, and machine learning substituted travel and extended the field in time and space. After restrictions eased, these computational results were reintroduced into interviews through visualizations that prompted important findings but also highlighted blind spots.
An Autopsy of State Finance: How Transnational Legal Structures Insulate Policies from Politics
*full draft available
This article shows how the transnational legal structures of state finance enable some policy funds to survive periods of state dismantling. Lawyers and bureaucrats insulate policy by intentionally distributing funding rules (how funds are raised), governance rules (how decisions are made), and disbursement rules (how funds are paid) across public–private and national–international jurisdictions. Drawing on environmental finance data, 70 in-depth interviews, and archival research, the article demonstrates policy insulation through a mixed-methods design of the Brazilian environmental state since 1990. First, through interviews and archival research, it shows how and why bureaucrats and lawyers opted for different transnational legal structures in the five main sources of environmental policy. Second, leveraging data that differentiate between resource commitment, allocation and disbursement, it shows that some resource flows survived Bolsonaro’s dismantling attempts while others did not. It ties survival back to specific strategies that disperse transnational legal structures in loose ways, making legal attacks harder. For scholars of democratic backsliding, the anatomy of state finance highlights how dismantling is uneven and constrained when state capacities are dispersed beyond national state. For sociologists of law and globalization, it shows how relationality and law matter beyond the household and financial markets and can also have positive unintended outcomes.
Putting power into boxes: Challenges and advantages of conducting surveys with elites [with Graziella Moraes Silva, Matias Lopez, and Debora Thome]
*Under review
While elite surveys have a long tradition in the social sciences, scholars have questioned their feasibility and analytical value, citing problems of sampling, access, and the limits of structured questionnaires. Drawing on metadata from over 300 elite samples across more than 60 countries, as well as our own mixed-method research with political, economic, and social elites in Brazil and South Africa, we reassess three recurrent critiques: that probabilistic sampling is ill-suited for elites, that elites are uniformly hard to survey, and that standardized instruments fail to capture elite attitudes. We show that probabilistic sampling can produce high-quality elite samples and defensible population-level estimates, and that structured questionnaires do not merely constrain expression but discipline elite respondents by predefining analytical categories and limiting rhetorical maneuvering. By compelling elites to position themselves within a shared classificatory space, surveys make variation and contradiction within elite worldviews empirically visible. We conclude that methodological choices in elite research should be guided less by assumptions about elites as a special population worthy of special methods than by clearly specified research questions, inferential aims, and substantive interests.
Easy and Hard Decarbonization: The (Im)possibility of Ecological Modernization in the Global South
*Writing Up
Ecological modernization theories foresee a positive relationship between economic growth and environmental protection, but evidence of such possibility remains scant in the age of the climate breakdown. A potential exception regularly put forth by environmentalists is Brazil: from 2004 to 2012, the country drastically reduced deforestation while increasing GDP. I argue the Brazilian case is not an example of ecological modernization: greening and growing coincided but are not causally linked. Rather, I demonstrate how negative environmental externalities were displaced in time and space. Building on the distinction between easy and hard redistribution, I propose a similar distinction for decarbonization. Expansions of the environmental state occur when the trade-off between greening and growth is small enough to generate supporting policy coalitions that do not draw attention from opposition (easy decarbonization). When the trade-off hardens, business elites block CO2 (hard decarbonization). I argue that Brazil in specific and many other Global South countries more generally are currently in a phase of hard protection. I discuss this framework considering other experiences, highlighting the conditions under which ecological modernization remains possible—or foreclosed—in the region.