Academic Profile

People Feature

Thiago R. Oliveira

Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Social Investigation

Research Interests: Criminology, Legitimacy of the Law, Policing, Violence, Quantitative Methods.

Thiago R. Oliveira is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Social Investigation and a Research Fellow of Nuffield College. He received his Ph.D. in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021. 

Thiago is a criminologist who draws on theories from sociology, social policy, and psychology to study the exercise of legal power and its effects on public recognition of authority and deviant behaviour. He uses policing and beliefs about the legitimacy of the law as his primary research examples, with special focus on large cities in the Global South. He approaches these topics with methods from quantitative social science and relies on statistical, computational, and econometric methods.

His chief research interests are primarily organised around three topics: temporal and spatial issues centred around the idea that members of the public can lose faith in legal institutions when they are repeatedly exposed to police misconduct and violence; effectiveness and consequences of aggressive policing tactics designed to tackle crime and ensure public safety; and criminal justice policy in Brazil. Thiago's methodological interests include longitudinal data analysis, causal inference with observational data, measurement, and R programming. His work has apperead in venues such as the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and Law & Society Review.

At Nuffield, he works with Dave Kirk on a project focused on police misconduct and gun violence in the United States.

Thiago Rodrigues Oliveira

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Papers

  • Jackson, Jonathan, Krisztián Pósch, Thiago R. Oliveira, Ben Bradford, Silvia Camões, Ariadne Natal, & André Zanetic. 2022. "Fear and Legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: Police-Citizen Relations in a High Violence, High Fear City." Law & Society Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12589

  • Oliveira, Thiago R., Jonathan Jackson, Kristina Murphy, & Ben Bradford. 2021. "Are Trustworthiness and Legitimacy 'Hard to Win, Easy to Lose'?  A Longitudinal Test of the Asymmetry Thesis of Police-Citizen Contact." Journal of Quantitative Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-020-09478-2

  • Jackson, Jonathan, Ian Bruton-Smith, Ben Bradford, Thiago R. Oliveira, Krisztián Pósch, & Patrick Sturgis. 2021. "Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale." Journal of Quantitative Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-020-09467-5

  • Oliveira Thiago R. & Jonathan Jackson. 2021. "Legitimacy, Trust and Legal Cynicism: A Review of Concepts." Tempo Social. https://doi.org/10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2021.191381 

  • Oliveira, Thiago R. 2019. "Juvenile Sentencing: A Mixed-Methods Approach." Brazilian Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-3821201900010006 

Working Papers

  • Oliveira, Thiago R. "Aggressive Policing and Undermined Legitimacy: Assessing the Impact of Police Stops at Gunpoint on Perceptions of Police in São Paulo, Brazil." Preprint available at SocArXiv.
    Conditionally accepted, Journal of Experimental Criminology.

  • Suss, Joel, & Thiago R. Oliveira. "Economic Inequality and the Spatial Distribution of Stop and Search: Evidence from London."
    Asked to revise and resubmit, British Journal of Criminology.

  • Oliveira, Thiago R., Marcos Cesar Alvares, & Bruna Gisi. "From an offender-based to an offense-based justice: Changes in sentencing patterns in the Brazilian juvenile justice system from 1990 to 2006."
    Asked to revise and resubmit, Crime, Law and Social Change.

  • Oliveira, Thiago R. "Violence and Coercive Policing: Dynamics and Consequences of the Overpolicing-Underpolicing Paradox in Brazil's Largest City." Preprint available at SocArXiv.
    Under review, Criminology.

  • Oliveira, Thiago R., Jonathan Jackson, Renan Theodoro de Oliveira, Debora Piccirillo, & Rick Trinkner. "Socialization Through Violence: Exposure to Neighborhood and Police Violence and the Developmental Trajectories of Legal Legitimacy Beliefs among Adolescents in São Paulo." Preprint available at SocArXiv.