Electoral autocracies have become one of the most prevalent forms of authoritarian rule. In these regimes, incumbents use state resources to shape electoral competition and bias outcomes in their favor. Existing research highlights media control, clientelism, and opposition harassment as central strategies. This paper identifies a distinct mechanism: the manipulation of electoral infrastructure as a tool of dispersed political engineering. We study this mechanism in Venezuela, an archetypal case of contemporary electoral autocracy, where the number of voting centers has nearly doubled over the last two decades. Using a novel panel dataset of geocoded polling centers covering 2000–2024, we examine the determinants of new center creation. We show that new voting centers are significantly more likely to be established in areas that previously exhibited stronger support for the incumbent. This relationship holds after accounting for population dynamics and spatial factors. The effect is particularly pronounced in urban areas and among centers that can be identified as politically motivated additions to the electoral infrastructure. We also find evidence that local pro-government organizations contribute to this process by generating bottom-up demand for new centers. These findings highlight how incumbents in electoral autocracies can manipulate the organization of elections to maintain political advantage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Albertus is a CDDRL Visiting Scholar and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. He has authored five books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles. His most recent book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, published by Basic Books in 2025, examines how land became power, how it shapes power, and how who holds that power determines the fundamental social problems that societies grapple with. Albertus' work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Development Economics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and elsewhere.