Yamile Guibert

Overview

I'm a third-year PhD student from the Government Department at Cornell University. I focus on the study of corruption, its different types, and their incidence on voting behavior in Latin America, with an emphasis on the Peruvian case.

Research Focus

I am interested in understanding why some cases in Latin America displayed a worsening of attitudes towards politicians and consequently higher levels of party system deinstitutionalization, while others remained generally unaffected after the Odebrecht scandal went public. I pose that the level of deinstitutionalization of political parties and party systems will depend on factors such as the amount and type of media coverage about the scandal, the level of effective prosecution of the crimes, and the antecedent level of institutionalization of political parties in each of the countries. This research project represents a contribution to the literature on party system institutionalization, which has focused on more structural factors and has not given enough attention to corruption and corruption scandals as explanations for decreasing levels of institutionalization in the Latin American region.