Under Threat: electoral consequences of criminal governance

The literature on the Politics and Economics of criminal governance has highlighted the important role played by criminal organizations in democratic elections, especially in Latin America. In this paper, we observe a crackdown against state-sponsored mafias (aKa “milıcias”) in Rio de Janeiro, and its consequences. We use this empirical setting to evaluate the effectiveness of the voting-manipulation mechanisms proposed by Bullock (2021), corralling and gatekeeping (keeping candidates away from the territory). We look into the electoral effects of the crackdown on candidates who were publicly anti-mafia and to those who were outed as mafiosi-politicians. Our analysis suggest that corralling does increase voteshare for known-gangsters in their areas of influence. Furthermore, our results suggest that gatekeeping has (limited) impacts, decreasing the voteshare of boycotted candidates. Finally, we estimate that mediatized anti-mafia strategies are able to overcome the policy gatekeeping enforced by actors who exert criminal governance and to gain votes within the corrals of mafiosi, in the coming elections, exposing the limits to gatekeeping in a context of secret ballots.