Lucia Tiscornia, Ph.D.

luciatiscornia@gmail.com


Assistant Professor

University College Dublin

Year of PhD: 2019

City: Dublin

Country: Ireland

About Me:

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, and a Research Affiliate with the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I hold a PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame, where I was also a PhD fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. My research, focusing on conflict termination, security sector reform, and criminal violence, has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Studies in Comparative International Development, Sociological Methods and Research, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, and the Journal of Urban Affairs. 
I am currently involved in two interrelated lines of research: I explore the conditions under which police reform contributes to the respect of human rights and crime reduction in post-conflict and democratic societies. In a series of articles I explore a variety of determinants of police violence. A recent project, combining extensive fieldwork and survey experiments, explores the determinants of public opinion support for punitive security policies. In a separate collaborative project I seek to understand how transitional justice mechanisms can break cycles of impunity during democratic transitions and reduce criminal violence post-transition. Relatedly, I conduct research on the determinants of organized criminal behavior. Within this line of research, I focus on the role of the security apparatus in increasing or decreasing violent criminal responses, as well as other criminal behavior such as market capture. 
I am also interested in issues of conceptualization, measurement, and mixed methods approaches. In 2014-2015 I was a Research Fellow for the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), one of the most extensive data gathering exercises on the features of democracy. In my own research, I combine qualitative and quantitative methods, including quasi-experimental and experimental designs, and have conducted extensive interviews during fieldwork in South Africa and Uruguay. The Uruguayan Agency for Research and Innovation, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and USAID’s Research and Innovation Fellowship Program have funded some of these research efforts. 
I hold a Master's degree in Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from the Universidad de la República in my home country of Uruguay. Prior to graduate studies I served as a specialist for the United Nations in Uruguay. 

Research Interests

Crime Politics

Political Violence

Human Rights

Police Violence

Criminal Violence

Transitional Justice

Countries of Interest

South Africa

Uruguay

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2023) Police reform in the aftermath of armed conflict: How militarization and accountability affect police violence, Journal of Peace Research

Police reform implementation has been widespread in post-conflict transitions. Responding to conflict recurrence and past human rights violations, among other factors, motivate reforms. However, we know little about the effectiveness of reforms in reducing police propensity for violence. How does police reform affect police violence after armed conflict? I argue that the nature of reforms poses a challenge to peace and stability: police reform may aggravate the problems it seeks to resolve. Increasing deterrent capacity reinforces militarization, a logic of organization to produce violence that accountability mechanisms – the generation of information and the imposition of costs on abuses – are unlikely to curb. I test these propositions on a panel of 55 post-conflict countries between 1985 and 2015. My findings challenge research suggesting that security reforms lead to peace. Results support policies that reduce police’s propensity to use force. Implications are relevant for domestic and international actors engaged in police reform.

(2022) Iteration in Mixed-Methods Research Designs Combining Experiments and Fieldwork, Sociological Methods and Research

Experimental designs in the social sciences have received increasing attention due to their power to produce causal inferences. Nevertheless, experimental research faces limitations, including limited external validity and unrealistic treatments. We propose combining qualitative fieldwork and experimental design iteratively—moving back-and-forth between elements of a research design—to overcome these limitations. To properly evaluate the strength of experiments researchers need information about the context, data, and previous knowledge used to design the treatment. To support our argument, we analyze 338 pre-analysis plans submitted to the Evidence in Governance and Politics repository in 2019 and the design of a study on public opinion support for punitive policing practices in Montevideo, Uruguay. The paper provides insights about using qualitative fieldwork to enhance the external validity, transparency and replicability of experimental research, and a practical guide for researchers who want to incorporate iteration to their research designs.

(2022) Dilemmas of Substitution: Why the urban poor support punitive policing in a Latin American city, Journal of Urban Affairs

In the Global South, the urban poor are heavily policed and bear the brunt of police violence. Evidence suggests that the urban poor also support punitive policing. Why do those individuals most affected by police violence also appear to support increased police presence in their neighborhoods? Combining extensive fieldwork with a public opinion survey in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, this paper develops a theory that the urban poor support punitive policing because it reduces other forms of violence they are routinely exposed to in public spaces. Our argument contrasts with the prevalent hypothesis that support for punitive policing amongst the urban poor originates in conservative views of security provision. Because Uruguay is a least likely case for this argument, our results are highly informative. The results demonstrate the deeply unequal distribution of the lived experience of authoritarian coercive practices in an otherwise democratic context.

(2022) How Climate Change Affects Organized Criminal Group Behavior, Studies in Comparative International Development

Climate-generated stress has been linked to multiple socio-political outcomes, many of which are violent. Scarcity is a key mechanism behind these violent outcomes. I argue that climate-induced scarcity creates conditions for organized criminal groups to capture the markets of legal commodities. Scarcity drives prices up, creating incentives for criminal groups to capture the production and distribution of these commodities with pernicious consequences. Using qualitative evidence for the abalone shellfish market in two South African provinces, I trace the process connecting climate-induced scarcity to price changes, to criminal market capture. In doing so, I make three contributions: I propose a new theory about the climate drivers behind the behavior of organized crime by bringing together scholarship on climate and conflict and criminal violence; I extend research on organized crime from markets of illicit goods into markets for licit ones; and I provide evidence suggestive of brokerage as a specific mechanism to illegally control a market.

(2022) Transparency and replicability in mixed-methods designs using experiments, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research

The use of mixed methods designs containing experiments has become more popular in the social sciences over the past decades (Harbers and Ingram 2020; Seawright 2016; Weller and Barnes 2014). In the analysis of experimental results, the qualitative component is typically used to illuminate causal mechanisms (Dunning 2015; Paluck 2010). However, when it comes to improving experimental designs, the capacity of qualitative methods to improve measurement is discussed less frequently. Prior to the analysis of data, qualitative methods can be used to design better contextualized, more realistic, experimental treatments (Dunning 2008; Dunning and Harrison 2010; Seawright 2016; 2021)3. Yet, the process of using qualitative methods to improve treatment design, for example, through the establishment of a sequence that can be replicated, is rarely formalized. We highlight the importance of standardizing the use of qualitative research to improve experimental treatments by pre-registering it as part of a pre-analysis plan. In formalizing this process, researchers can contribute to the transparency and replicability of the entire research process.

(2018) Breaking State Impunity in Postauthoritarian Regimes: Why Transitional Justice Mechanisms Deter Criminal Violence in New Democracies, Journal of Peace Research

This article claims that cross-national variation in criminal violence in new democracies is highly dependent on whether elites adopt transitional justice processes to address a repressive past. State specialists in violence who repress political dissidents under authoritarian rule often play a crucial role in the operation of criminal markets and in the production of criminal violence in democracy. Some of them defect from the state to become the armed branch of criminal organizations in their deadly fights against the state and rival groups; others remain but protect criminal organizations from positions of state power; and still others use state power to fight criminals through iron-fist policies. When post-authoritarian elites adopt transitional justice processes to expose, prosecute, and punish state specialists in violence for gross human rights violations committed during the authoritarian era, they redefine the rules of state coercion and deter members of the armed forces and the police from becoming leading actors in the production of criminal violence. Using a dataset of 76 countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy between 1974 and 2005, we show that the adoption of strong truth commissions is strongly associated with lower murder rates; we also find that the implementation of trials that result in guilty verdicts is associated with lower homicide rates only when the trials are jointly implemented with a strong truth commission. In contrast, amnesty laws appear to stimulate criminal violence. Our findings are particularly robust for Latin America and remain unchanged even after addressing selection effects via matching techniques.

Book Chapters:

(2022) International Influence, in Why Democracies Develop and Decline, Cambridge University Press

This chapter develops and tests hypotheses about possible influences that lie outside national borders. There are many good reasons to expect that domestic factors are not the sole determinants. We lay out a theoretical framework that systematically catalogues most of the possible international hypotheses: exogenous shocks and endogenous networks such as those linking neighbors, allies, and colonizers and colonies. We then test selected hypotheses about exogenous shocks and contagion – the spread of democracy outcomes from country to country through various international networks. Surprisingly, contagion at first appears to be real but so small that it could be ignored when studying domestic influences. However, for some kinds of contagion our analysis implies that the long-run effects grow quite large and must be taken into account if we want to understand how democracies develop and decline. This paradox leads us to conclude that international influences are a hidden dimension of democratization.

Book Reviews:

(2023) Review of "Police: A Field Guide", Australian Institute of International Affairs

Despite increasing awareness of the need for reform, police abuse and violence remain a major problem in the United States. In Police: A Field Guide, David Correia and Tyler Wall provide a compelling explanation as to why this is the case.

(2021) Book Review: Authoritarian Police in Democracy, Perspectives on Politics

Review of "Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America" by Yanilda Gonzalez.

Media Appearances:

TV Appearances:

(2020) France 24 in Spanish

Interview about police violence in the USA

Blog Posts:

(2023) Political Violence at a Glance

CONSUMERS BEWARE: THE PRICE OF AVOCADOS IS HIGHER THAN YOU THINK

(2021) CIPER

Protests and Police Violence in Colombia (in Spanish).

(2020) CIPER

Why police violence persists (in Spanish)

Other:

(2020) La Diaria

Opinion piece about the negative consequences of punitive policing practices in Uruguay (in Spanish).

(2019) La Diaria

Opinion piece about a plebiscite aiming at implementing punitive policing practices in Uruguay (in Spanish).