Luiz Vilaça is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. In the fall of 2024, he will become an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College.
Luiz’s research cuts across Sociology of Law and Politics, and seeks to explain the causes of corruption prosecutions. His mixed-methods dissertation examines Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato) in Brazil, a widespread corruption scandal that resulted in the conviction of over 200 business executives and politicians. Luiz’s research is composed of two projects. The first one focuses on prosecutors and is structured around a comparative analysis of task forces of prosecutors with different levels of effectiveness. Drawing on 120 in-depth interviews, Luiz examines the group-level processes through which prosecutors build capacities to discover schemes of corruption, resist external and internal threats to the investigation, and obtain convictions against economic and political elites. The second part of his research zooms into the Judiciary, drawing on two original datasets and interviews. First, Luiz used supervised machine learning to build a dataset of corruption appeals from the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil, and uses this dataset to examine how judges’ ideology and external factors such as social movement mobilization affect the outcomes of corruption cases. Moreover, he constructed a dataset that tracks the judicial proceedings of each defendant (N=1,053) charged as part of Operation Car Wash. Drawing on this dataset, he examines judicial biases in corruption trials. |