Political Science

Débora is a sixth-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Brown University and a Research Affiliate at the Civil Conflict and Democratic Erosion Lab at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her primary field is Comparative Politics, with a regional focus on Latin America.  She is broadly interested in the politics of land and its political, welfare, and environmental consequences for rural communities and beyond. In her dissertation, she investigates the intersection of land titling policies and the erosion of grassroots rural organization in agricultural frontier regions. She examines how incumbents can strategically deploy land titling initiatives not to empower marginalized communities, but to dismantle them—especially in areas where land is highly contested. She focuses on the case of land reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon, employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quasi-experimental strategies, original survey data, and in-depth interviews collected over a year of field work. In parallel, she is also engaged in a collaborative project that explores the roots and consequences of violence against environmental defenders in the Amazon region. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a political journalist for local news outlets in Brazil and as a communication manager at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology. She holds a BA in Journalism and Political Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil, and a MA in Political Science from Brown University.

Job Market Paper Title

Land Titling and the Erosion of Rural Political Organization in the Brazilian Amazon

Job Market Paper Abstract

The formalization of land rights is widely assumed to generate positive outcomes for populations living under some form of tenure insecurity. Whether in urban or rural contexts, access to land titles is typically equated with individual empowerment vis-à-vis the state and greater security of property rights. This study challenges this conventional narrative by showing that, in agricultural frontier regions, land titling policies can be leveraged by political elites to displace and demobilize marginalized communities. While formalization may enhance individual autonomy, it can also erode the infrastructure of collective political life, redirecting participation away from community-based organizations and toward individualized channels. I develop a new framework to specify the conditions under which this occurs and examine its broader implications for grassroots organizations in the context of land reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon. I rely on a mixed-methods strategy that combines administrative data on land titles, voting booth information,  original household survey conducted across 195 rural communities in Pará, and in-depth interviews. The results show that titling weakens community-level organization and carries adverse welfare and environmental consequences. By uncovering the collective costs of land formalization, this paper contributes to the scholarship on property rights related to land, distributive politics, and collective action.