Dr Mariana Borges is a Lecturer in Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. She researches political behavior, political parties, representation, and misinformation with a regional focus on Brazil.
Mariana’s main research is her book project, “The Power of Culture: Political Behavior, Clientelism, and Programmatic Politics.” Based on her long-term ethnographic research among low-income voters in rural Brazil, the book introduces a new way to understand culture and its role in shaping the political behavior of voters, candidates, and political parties.
Mariana also has two other research agendas extending her research on culture’s role in shaping political behavior. The first one seeks to reveal how voters’ taken-for-granted ideas about politics and how political candidates should look may hinder the representation of candidates from marginalized groups.
Finally, more recently, Mariana also started a new research project about the role of culture in the spread of misinformation. Based on the comparison of the trajectory and the determinants of two health-related misinformation stories during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, Mariana examines how local beliefs are also crucial to understanding why some fake news becomes widespread and others don’t.
Mariana teaches a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, including Informal Politics, Qualitative Methods, and Introduction to Political Systems.
Dr Mariana Borges joined Southampton in 2024. Before that, she was a postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at the Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She received her PhD in Politics from Northwestern University in 2019.