On these topics, she co-authored (with Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, and Guillermo Rosas) the book Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[12] Zechmeister's early work questions how voters in new Latin American democracies understood ideological labels, for example in her dissertation “Sheep or Shepherds?
In related work, she demonstrates that the Partido Revoluncionario Institucional’s (PRI) decades-long hegemony made location for other parties in the left-right ideological space challenging.
Building off surveys conducted following the Chilean and Haitian earthquakes in 2010, Zechmeister explores in a set of papers the effect material damage and loss has on democratic attitudes and interpersonal trust.
In a paper coauthored with Ryan Carlin and Gregory Love, she shows disaster victims in Chile often become less tolerant and supportive of democracy while also becoming more civically engaged.
[18] In a second paper with Carlin and Love, Zechmeister finds that, contrary to much of the existing scholarship, disaster loss can reduce social capital, but only in low state-capacity environments.