Research

My current research investigates the impacts of structural injustice on political representation. I use quantitative and qualitative empirical data to demonstrate race and gender-based marginalization in legislative institutions —primarily in Mexico and Latin America. I then use these empirical analyses to inform normative discussions about how to (practically) respond to these injustices.

My main areas of interests are political theory, legislative studies, sociology of race, and how these should inform public policy. However, I enjoy collaborating with scholars working on other topics and disciplines, particularly where my skills in digital tools enhance and buttress their projects. Currently, I’m involved in these large projects:

Title	Description
Diaspora Humanitarians	Funded by the Australian Research Council; led by Prof. Bina Fernandez. I was responsible for the quantitative phase of the project (i.e., data collection, visualisation and analysis) and collaborated in the qualitative data analysis too.
Emerging Voices: Redefining Civic Culture for Mexico City’s Youth	Funded by ITESM’s Challenge-Based Research Funding Program in collaboration with Mexico City’s Electoral Institute, this project (led by Sergio Bárcena), studies how digital technologies facilitate the way youth from underserved areas in Mexico engage with civic life and politics.
Illiberal Language Diffusion Index (ILDI)	Funded by the University of Melbourne’s Fighting Harmful Online Communication Hallmark Research Initiative and co-led by Seraphine Maerz, this project aims to empirically operationalise and measure illiberal language diffusion, a key component of Maerz’s (2026) normalisation theory that currently stands on narrow empirical grounds. The project will generate a new Illiberal Language Diffusion Index (ILDI) to probe the mechanisms through which illiberal language diffusion is causally linked to autocratisation, if at all.
Right-wing populism and the political feasibility of climate policy	Funded by the Norwegian Research Council; led by Robyn Eckersley (University of Melbourne), Guri Bang (NMBU) and Håkon Sælen (CICERO). I’ve scraped parliamentary data from Australia and the United States to text-mine the speeches of legislators and conduct sentiment and discourse analyses.
Towards an Infracategorical Model of Ethnoracial Politics: Skin Tone, Bodily Capital, and Political Representation	Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation —in collaboration with Prof. Ellis Monk—, this project investigates ethnoracial political representation in the United States. It proposes an Infracategorical Model of Ethnoracial Politics (IMEP) to 1) question the cues of categories, subcategories, and perceived typicality; 2) center the role of the body in inequality and politics and 3)turn analytic attention to operative, yet occluded, principles of social vision and division that tend to lack political salience (e.g., colorism and lookism). Methodologically, the project deploys innovative computational techniques to operationalize political representation.
Words of Warning	Led by Seraphine Maerz (University of Melbourne) this project -funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC)- aims to investigate the relationship between illiberal public discourse and democratic decline by analysing large amounts of political speeches from dozens of democracies around the world. The project employs an innovative combination of quantitative methods and specifically fine-tuned Large Language Models to develop an early-warning system for democratic backsliding.

Interested in collaborating? Contact me at rene.rejon [at] unimelb.edu.au