The devil inside: candidates with low democratic commitment in Latin America

This dissertation aims to contribute to our knowledge about political actors. First, I focus on politicians’ behavior during presidential campaigns. Taking advantage of public data from Twitter and novel tools from computational social science such as Machine Learning, I find that candidates not only engage in negative campaigning against other opponents but also negative campaigning against institutions with checks and balance functions. Moreover, I show that negative campaigning against checks and balance institutions is a proxy for candidates’ low democratic commitment. In the second chapter of this project, I demonstrate that there are negative consequences for countries’ democracy of electing a president that has signaled their low democratic commitment during the electoral campaign. The results suggest that these types of presidents make democratic backsliding more likely. Finally, in the third chapter, I explore how these candidates develop their low democratic commitment.I argue that candidates develop their political values during their early political socialization process. Likewise, I bring evidence that the presence of subnational authoritarian enclaves in democratic countries supplies candidates with a low democratic commitment to the national arena