Catarina is an LSE Fellow in Advanced Quantitative Methods. She is a political economist working on authoritarian legacies, democratic erosion, and political extremism, with a focus on both historical and contemporary cases. She holds a D.Phil. (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford (2023) and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AxPo-CEE, Sciences Po Paris (2023–2025).

Her research examines how the economic policies of past autocratic regimes continue to influence contemporary politics, particularly the rise of extremism and democratic polarisation. She also studies how autocratic legacies shape redistribution preferences and public policy attitudes. Methodologically, her work draws on quantitative approaches, with a focus on causal inference, quasi-experimental designs, preprocessing techniques, and applied geospatial analysis.

Her book project, based on her doctoral dissertation, explores how different top-down economic policy strategies in autocratic regimes, aimed at building support, shaped post-transitional voting patterns. It shows how these strategies influenced support for extremist and mainstream parties with ties to former regimes, thereby contributing to the persistence of extremism in contemporary democracies long after authoritarian rule had ended. To explain these dynamics, she employs a novel political economy framework.

Research interests:

Catarina’s research focuses on the legacies of autocratic regimes from a political economy and rational choice perspective, with particular attention to democratic erosion and political extremism. She investigates how the policies of former autocracies continue to shape contemporary politics, especially the rise of extremism and democratic polarisation, as well as broader public attitudes toward redistribution and policy.