The PoliCICS working group maintains an active calendar of regular sessions, traditionally held on Thursdays at 11:30 AM. These instances constitute a fundamental space for discussing research progress, piloting experimental designs, and presenting work by both our researchers and national and international guests.
Below you can see the record of the sessions held during the 2025 academic cycle.
| Date | Presenter | Title | Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 10 | Denise Laroze (CICS) | Multi-level collective action in small-scale fisheries: An experimental approach | This study investigates the dynamics of collective action in small-scale fisheries through a framed lab-in-the-field experiment with artisanal fishers. Drawing on theories of common-pool resource management and social identity, we examine how trust, conflict, and beliefs about others influence compliance behavior in resource extraction contexts. Participants took part in a multi-round game simulating over-extraction decisions under two management regimes: TURFs (territorial use rights for fisheries) and open-access areas. The experimental design featured two scenarios—interactions with unknown individuals and with known peers from neighboring fishing organizations. Data from 164 fishers, predominantly male and with extensive experience in loco harvesting, reveal distinct patterns of strategic behavior shaped by both social and institutional factors. Findings suggest that beliefs about others, alongside the governance context, play a critical role in determining compliance and over-extraction levels. These results offer valuable insights into the interplay between identity and multi-level governance in promoting sustainable resource use. |
| April 17 | Francisco Villarroel (CICS) | Experimental Pilot: Dominant leaders nastiness: Effects of Normative messages on followers nastiness behavior | In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of authoritarian or dominant leaders around the world, accompanied by citizens who not only support punitive actions but also participate in aggressive and risky behaviors (Lippert, 2024). Evolutionary studies describe these leaders as “dominant,” that is, individuals who control resources asymmetrically through coercion and intimidation (Petersen et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2022). This session seeks to pilot a second version of the experimental design to analyze how dominant leaders influence the aggressive behavior of their followers through normative messages. In this session, the entire experimental protocol will be carried out, and messages, new ways of measuring social expectations, among others, will be tested. Feedback from the working group is expected for final adjustments before beginning data collection in May of this year. |
| April 24 | Dr. Jorge Fábrega (CICS) | Beyond Parties: Assessing Ideological Representation in the Chilean Constitutional Convention | What happens when candidates—independent or partisan—compete on equal footing? This study examines ideological alignment between Chilean citizens and the delegates elected to draft the 2021–2022 Constitution. Using advanced scaling methods and survey data, it finds that citizens were ideologically more moderate, while elected representatives—especially on the left—were more polarized. The evidence suggests that rather than achieving better ideological representation, voters likely chose based on party rejection and limited information. This suggest that equal access to candidacy does not guarantee ideological alignment without informed voting and institutional cues. |
| May 8 | Dr. Carlos Navarrete (UdeC) | Hot Seat: Predicting parliamentary representation using machine learning | In the context of the 2025 legislative elections, StreamData presents Hot Seat, a study of seat prediction and political force analysis based on artificial intelligence. Based on current trends and historical results, including parliamentary and municipal elections, we project which parties will face greater risks of losing representation and which have higher probabilities of winning new seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The model identifies seats with high uncertainty, indicated by diagonal lines, where less than half of the simulations yield a consistent result for a party. This analysis offers a strategic view of the expected political realignment in 2025 using public data, such as electoral records. |
| May 22 | Juan Pablo Couyoumdjian and María Paz Raveau (CICS) | Persisting influence? A new database of the elite in the Chilean Congress 1810-2022 | This paper presents an original database on the elite in the Chilean Congress, specifically, in the Chamber of Deputies since the dawn of Independence. By classifying Chilean legislators as members of the elite based on their genealogical information, we can complement the political and social history of the country. We propose a definition of elite in terms of lineage to "traditional" Colonial families and to the "founding fathers" of the national Independence. We study the influence of belonging to the elite on the probability of re-election to Congress in different subsets defined by constitutional periods. Our study illustrates the effects of democratization processes on political elites and has wider implications for comparative politics. |
| June 5 | Naim Bro (UAI) | An electoral geography of the Brahmin vs. Merchant cleavage in Santiago | This project investigates the growing political and territorial division within the elites of Santiago, Chile, following the Brahmin vs. Merchant hypothesis proposed by Piketty. Through geospatial analysis, census data, and electoral results since 1989, we seek to map how high-income and high-education sectors are distributed, and how their political preferences diverge. The study combines quantitative methods and natural language processing to also characterize partisan discourses. The objective is to offer a comprehensive understanding of the reconfiguration of the Chilean political system from within privilege itself. |
| June 19 | Alejandra Molina (CICS) | Compliance Regarding Water Regulations in Situations of Water Scarcity | Effective water management requires understanding both hydrological systems and human behavior. Using experimental data from Chile, we examine how three types of scarcity—individual exogenous, endogenous, and collective exogenous—affect compliance with irrigation rules. Our findings suggest that traditional regulatory approaches, focused on deterrence and information provision, may be insufficient or ineffective in the face of persistent scarcity. |
| July 17 | Elisa Durán Micco (MIPP) | Subordination and System Justification: An Economic Model | We propose a model of group-based social hierarchies in which individuals can ignore their relative disadvantage position due to a cognitive bias. Building on insights from social psychology and system justification theory, our framework posits a trade-off between optimistic acceptance of the social order and recognizing its costs. The model allows for two types of redistribution mechanisms: private---i.e., transfers from subordinates to dominants---and public, which mitigates inter-group differences. We characterize the equilibrium and show that subordinates engage in productive efforts when they neglect enough information, sustaining the system when unaware of their injustice. Awareness hinges on the cost of effort and the magnitude of public redistribution: higher effort costs increase awareness, as does more substantial public redistribution. We illustrate the applicability of our model by relating it to the economics of motherhood decisions and the cost of children. |
| August 14 | John Londregan (Princeton University) | Hawks and Vultures: a Theory of the International Arms Trade | The international arms trade is a matter both of economics and of national security. Here we derive the demand for arms from the fundamentals of the conflict between two potential belligerants. We go on to show the competing pressures of geopolitics and profit that influence arms suppliers. We find that vulnerable countries have inelastic demand for arms, so they will only receive favorable pricing for political reasons. We also find that countries with non-aligned foreign policies are better able to generate revenue from arms sales. |
| August 28 | Jorge Fábrega (CICS) | Ideological maps of the Chilean Congress (2002–2026): A longitudinal database from bill votes | This seminar aims to present a new database containing standardized ideological estimates for all deputies of the Chilean Lower House between 2002 and 2026. The positions are obtained from one-dimensional scaling models applied to bill votes, allowing observation of dynamics of polarization, cohesion or party fragmentation, and structural changes in the Chilean political system. In this instance, the main characteristics of the database, its potential for comparative and analytical use will be presented, and the academic community will be invited to explore, reuse, and contribute to its development. The presentation is oriented towards researchers interested in legislative behavior and polarization, as well as those wishing to link these data to electoral, territorial, or institutional studies. |
| September 11 | Denise Laroze (CICS) | Manuscript Review: ‘Engines of Outrage’ | This study investigates the efficacy of various methods for inducing anger and frustration in a laboratory experiment and elicits subjects' responses on risk aversion, cheating, and the provision of recommendations under conflict of interest. Our treatments include conventional approaches like emotionally charged videos and autobiographical recall, alongside novel techniques such as a malfunctioning game and an unexpected negative economic shock. Emotional responses are measured using standard self-reported measures of positive and negative emotions. All methods successfully elevated self-reported anger, with traditional methods eliciting more intense and focused responses. However, the increased levels of anger and frustration do not alter subjects' decisions. We discuss the implications for the experimental methodology and the theories of emotions and decision-making. |
| September 25 | Jorge Fábrega (CICS) | Affective polarization and leadership types: implications for political communication | This project seeks to analyze the evolution of citizen perceptions of political leadership. Based on open mentions of attributes that people associate with political leaders in a set of surveys, attributes were coded into three dimensions: change, collaboration–firmness, and affect–rationality. Preliminary results show a shift towards greater demand for affective closeness as an electoral period approaches. Differences are observed according to political alignment and level of political interest: some groups privilege emotional confrontation, while others value rational negotiation. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that crises and electoral cycles intensify the demand for emotional leadership, with implications for communication and democratic governance. |
| October 9 | Bastián González Bustamante (Leiden University) | Unpacking the Unpredictable: From Machine Learning to Generative AI for Detecting Crises in Presidential Democracies | The study expands the data collection from my PhD at the University of Oxford (methodological article: https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393251315917), scaling processing from traditional text-as-data approaches to contemporary generative models. The main objective is to detect and classify critical events, such as social unrest, economic crises, natural disasters, and media scandals, in news archives, link them to cabinet outcomes, and quantify how crises translate into reorganizations in presidential systems. The workflow combines event extraction, annotation by various coders to build a reference standard, and comparison of LLMs with established classifiers. |
| October 23 | Aníbal Olivera (CICS) | Networks Decide for Us: When networks shape behavior more than intentions | People rarely act in isolation. This work models how social distance and network reinforcement jointly shape individual adoption, whether of new ideas or collective causes. Agents decide to adopt when personal utility outweighs costs, or when enough peers within their social neighborhood do so. Using survey-based proxies of openness to innovation (ATP) and propensity for collective action (GSS 2004), we simulate diffusion on imputed social networks across a wide parameter space. Findings reveal regions where social influence dominates rational choice, producing sharp phase transitions in adoption levels. Both innovation and mobilization emerge as outcomes of the same mechanism: interdependent decision-making constrained by social distance. |
| November 6 | Ricardo Guzmán (CICS) | The Puzzle of Rational Compromise: Formalizing and Testing an Augmented Dual-Process Model | The Dual-Process Model of Judgment (DPMJ) remains the dominant paradigm for explaining moral conflict. However, recent empirical evidence (Guzmán et al., 2022) presents a significant challenge: individuals frequently make economically rational (GARP-consistent) compromise judgments in non-dichotomous sacrificial dilemmas. This behavior cannot be explained by the standard integrative DPMJ, which relies on a binary comparator mechanism to weigh System 1 emotional aversion against System 2 utilitarian assessments. While it has been argued (Greene, 2023) that the DPMJ is capable of integrating these competing valuations into a compromise, this claim has lacked a formal specification. This presentation introduces the "Augmented DPMJ," a formal microeconomic model developed by Guzmán and Cosmides that addresses this theoretical gap. |
| November 20 | Camila Utreras (CICS) | Generation and Validation of a Learning Sequence for Irreversible Decisions: The case of retirement in Chile | The retirement process in Chile involves irreversible decisions that many people face with limited time and low pension literacy. In this context, actions that promote education in the area emerge as an improvement alternative. This project addresses this gap by evaluating whether a personalized learning route can translate into better learning than free navigation. To answer this, we will implement an online experiment with adults close to retirement age. After initial profiling, the treatment group will study through a personalized learning route while the control group will freely explore the contents, emulating current websites. It is expected that learning, measured with a post-intervention questionnaire, will improve for the treatment group (personalized learning route), in relation to the control group (free navigation), providing empirical evidence to improve digital platforms that support informed and autonomous irreversible decision-making, as is the case of the decision to retire in our country. In this opportunity, I will request your support to pilot the first part of this experiment, which consists of a focus group to evaluate the content and questions of the knowledge questionnaire. |
| December 4 | Constanza Pino (CICS) | Interventions for Food Consumption in Adult Women Through Embodiment Mechanisms | In this project, food choice in adult women will be explored under the cognitive embodiment framework. For this, two studies are proposed to cover different aspects: a bottom-up study based on emotional eating and interoceptive deficit in participants of the Elige Vida Sana program under family vincular therapy; and an experimental study aimed at manipulating the sense of embodiment based on Regulatory Focus Theory. Through the analysis of both embodiment mechanisms, it is intended to understand the bodily factors that influence food choice, both from internal body signals and the perception of body image. |
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