Publications
- Altamirano, Melina. 2019. “Economic Vulnerability and Partisanship in Latin America.” Latin American Politics and Society, 61, no. 3: 80–103. https://doi.org/10.1017/lap.2019.7
- Trejo, Guillermo and Melina Altamirano. 2016. “The Mexican Color Hierarchy: How Race and Skin Tone Still Define Life Chances 200 Years after Independence” in Hooker, J. and Tillery, A. (eds.), The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas, American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.
- Kitschelt, Herbert and Melina Altamirano. 2015. “Clientelism in Latin America. Effort and Effectiveness” in Ryan Carlin, Matthew Singer, and Elizabeth Zechmeister (eds.), The Latin American Voter, University of Michigan Press.
- Wibbels, Erik, David Rueda and Melina Altamirano. 2015. “The Origins of Dualism”, in Pablo Beramendi, Silja Häusermann, Herbert Kitschelt and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Politics of Advanced Capitalism, Cambridge University Press.
Dissertation
The main focus of my dissertation is on the political consequences of labor markets and income insecurity in young democracies. Many developing countries have dual labor markets, with large informal sectors where workers are not covered by formal labor arrangements and have no access to social security institutions. I analyze the effect of economic informality on three key dimensions: social policy preferences, partisan attachments, and citizen-politician linkages.
My central argument is that economic informality reduces the demand for redistribution and weakens programmatic linkages between voters and political parties. The research builds on cross-national survey data for Latin America, an original survey conducted in Mexico, as well as in-depth interviews with informal workers.
