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Mariana Borges is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton, where she focuses on political behavior, political parties, representation, and misinformation, particularly in Brazil. Her current research project involves a book titled 'The Power Culture: Political Behavior, Clientelism, Programmatic Politics,' which builds on long-term ethnographic research among low-income voters in rural Brazil. In this work, she introduces a new understanding of how culture shapes the political behavior of voters, candidates, and political parties. Additionally, Mariana is investigating the role of culture in the spread of misinformation, through a project that compares the determinants of health-related misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, analyzing local beliefs that contribute to the proliferation of fake news. Before joining Southampton in 2024, she was a postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, after completing her PhD in Politics at Northwestern University in 2019.