Camila Contreras Martínez

A large body of literature documents a positive relationship between legislative representation and redistribution, particularly in the United States. Standard legislative bargaining models further reinforce this association. Yet both theory and empirical findings rely on two critical assumptions: that legislatures possess sufficient budgetary authority and that legislators face strong electoral incentives. This paper shows that, in a context where those conditions do not hold, the link between representation and redistribution disappears. We study the effect of representation on intergovernmental transfers in Chile, a unitary country with a Congress with limited budgetary power, elected in multi-member districts. We exploit two quasi-natural experiments — the authoritarian origins of the electoral system and its recent reform — to provide causal identification. Across both sources of exogenous variation in representation, we find no significant effects on redistribution. Our findings highlight the mediating role of institutions in shaping the consequences of legislative malapportionment.

How does criminal violence reshape how civilians move about their communities? While criminal violence is widely cited as a driver of internal and international displacement, we know much less about how gangs shape mobility within their territories. In this paper, we argue that control over civilian mobility is a central pillar of criminal governance. When gangs control access to neighborhoods, roads, and transport corridors, this not only enables them to govern, but also signal relative strength and capacity to rival gangs and state forces. As territorial order deteriorates, visible control over these boundaries becomes more salient, and thus civilian movement into and out of gang-controlled areas may signal weakness or vulnerability. To re-enforce their control, gangs use violence to immobilize civilians and retain the political and economic capital that comes with them within their territorial boundaries. We examine this argument in Haiti, where gangs operate as de facto authorities across much of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. Using daily commune-level data on gang violence and anonymized mobility estimates derived by Flowminder from Digicel call detail records, we trace how violent events shape intra- and inter-commune movement. We find that gang violence produces immediate and significant declines in mobility, with each additional violent event depresses localized movements in the following days. The effects are shape both within- and across-commune travel and are especially large following attacks on infrastructure. Thus, gang violence can serve as a strategic mechanism of territorial immobilization and reshapes how civilians navigate criminally governed space.

How do international, armed, humanitarian interventions shape gang violence, and by extension, influence civilian mobility on the ground? Focusing on the U.N. Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti (2023–present), we exploit a daily panel of commune-level data on gang violence, using data from ACLED, Haitian press reports, and mobile-phone mobility records, using estimates derived by Flowminder from Digicel call detail records, to trace the impact of five exogenous information shocks on the mission's likelihood and timing. We find that as the intervention appeared more imminent, gangs reduced inter-gang clashes and forged tactical alliances, redirected violence toward the state, and escalated remote attacks on infrastructure. These anticipatory shifts had immediate civilian consequences, as heightening violence reduced both intra- and inter-communal movement, revealing how violence shapes everyday mobility. By integrating high-frequency measures of both violence and movement, this study contributes to research on the consequences of external security governance, showing that the pre-deployment phase of intervention is a politically charged period in which armed actors and civilians adapt in ways that can entrench insecurity before the first foreign boots touch the ground.