Partisan Prosecution? Theory and Evidence from Corruption Probes in Argentina

As courts around the world become more active in convicting politicians for corruption, politicians have increasingly responded by appointing partisan judicial actors in the hope of securing judicial protection. Does this strategy lead to partisan bias in corruption investigations? We address this question by analyzing prosecutorial behavior in all corruption probes filed in Comodoro Py—Argentina's most prominent federal court circuit—between 2013 and 2023.

Speaker: Guadalupe Tuñón, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

About the Speaker 

Guadalupe Tuñón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She specializes in comparative politics and political economy, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book project explores how religious ideas about economics and inequality influence the electoral and policy impact of religious actors.

Dr. Tuñón earned her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2019. Prior to joining Princeton, she was an Academy Scholar at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also held predoctoral fellowships at the Identity & Conflict Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

About the Moderator

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.

Presented in collaboration with Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.