Professor Vilaça’s research examines the causes and consequences of prosecutions against the powerful, such as corporate elites, politicians, and police officers.
The first strand of this agenda takes up white-collar corruption. His book project Politicians Behind Bars draws on more than 120 in-depth interviews to explain how prosecutors’ cultural and organizational practices shape their capacity to prosecute economic and political elites. Its quantitative side explains how judges make decisions in corruption trials, analyzing whether sentencing and appeals are affected by judges’ ideology, defendants’ political affiliation, and social movement mobilization.
A second project turns to the legitimacy of the courts. Drawing on survey experiments, Professor Vilaça tests whether support for the judiciary is affected by judicial misconduct, rulings in corruption and insurrection trials, and efforts to reform courts.
A third project focuses on police violence. It examines both the obstacles prosecutors face in convicting officers who abused their power and the mechanisms through which prosecutors proactively regulate public safety, such as cooperating with police departments to establish new rules and protocols for officer conduct.
Professor Vilaça’s articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Social Forces, Social Problems, Law & Society Review, among other venues.
