CDDRL Visiting Scholar Michael Albertus’s Research Seminar presentation, “Winning Under Electoral Authoritarianism: Turning Out the ‘Right’ Votes in Venezuela,” examined how electoral infrastructure can become a subtle but powerful tool of authoritarian political control. The presentation, based on joint work with Felipe Baritto and Dany Jaimovich, focused on Venezuela and asked whether the expansion of polling centers under Chávez and Maduro was simply a response to demographic demand or whether it was politically targeted to benefit the ruling coalition.

The central puzzle of the presentation was that Venezuela substantially expanded its electoral infrastructure between 2000 and 2024, with the number of polling centers increasing by about 70 percent, even though population growth was much smaller. Albertus situated this puzzle within the broader literature on competitive authoritarianism, where regimes often maintain formally competitive elections but tilt the playing field through institutional design, state resources, media control, opposition harassment, and selective manipulation. His key contribution was to show that the organization of voting infrastructure itself may belong on this “menu of manipulation.”

The empirical strategy was built around a geocoded dataset of voting centers across Venezuelan election periods. The authors identified “new” polling centers and used stable polling centers to construct electoral Voronoi polygons, which served as local catchment areas. This allowed them to ask whether areas with higher prior support for Chavismo were more likely to receive new voting centers in later periods. Their baseline models used polygon and election-period fixed effects, with controls such as population, and clustered standard errors by municipality.

The main result was that lagged regime support predicted the creation of new polling centers. A 10-percentage-point increase in regime support was associated with roughly a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a new polling center relative to the sample mean. Areas in the top quartile of regime support were about 30 percent more likely to receive a new center. These effects were strongest in urban areas and became larger as elections tightened and regime support weakened.

Albertus also presented evidence that new polling centers were not politically neutral spaces. Many carried regime-aligned names and ideological language, including terms associated with Bolivarianism, Chávez, communes, popular power, and revolutionary programs. This suggested that polling centers were not only administrative sites but also spaces of political embedding.

The presentation then turned to consequences. New polling centers were associated with higher turnout, especially in areas already supportive of the regime. They were also linked to smaller polling centers and more single-table centers, which may have made voter monitoring easier. In the 2024 election, the opposition's collection of actas (vote tabulations) was less likely in polygons where new polling stations had previously been established, suggesting that infrastructure expansion may have weakened the opposition's monitoring capacity.

Overall, the presentation argued that authoritarian regimes do not always need to rely on blatant fraud or overt suppression. They can instead selectively expand access, making voting easier for supporters while improving their own capacity for mobilization and monitoring. The project’s broader significance lies in showing how seemingly technical decisions about election administration can have deeply political effects.