AY 2019-20
CPD Research Associate: Justine Davis
Project Description: Developing a research design to investigate increasing youth involvement in elections that have the potential to be violent in sub-Saharan Africa, using social media (e.g. WhatsApp and Facebook). It will involve writing literature reviews, database creation, and webscrapping.
CPD Research Associate: Natalia Garbiras Diaz
Project Title: Democracy in the era of political disillusionment: is moderation ever strategic for outsiders?
Project Description: Outsider candidates have been present in politics around the globe for decades. The most well-known outsider candidates who have won office share a populist style and have adopted extreme positions on policy issues, both on the right and on the left of the political spectrum (e.g., Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, among others, including Donald Trump in the U.S.). This empirical observation has, in turn, led the literature on outsider candidates to focus almost exclusively on describing and studying the consequences of anti-establishment/extremist candidates (e.g., Levitsky et al. 2016; Carreras 2012; Serra 2018). However, these studies have overlooked important variation between outsider candidates. Notably, the last presidential elections in France, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, among other countries, all included moderate candidates running for office, who did not campaign on a populist style nor on extremist positions. This project seeks to fill in this gap by studying the strategic decisions adopted by candidates running as independents or with newly created parties (i.e., new entrants) in terms of where to locate along the policy dimension and which type of rhetoric to employ when appealing to voters.
Undergraduate Role: CPD fellows will be asked to take part in one or both of the following two different parts of the project. First, they will help creating an exhaustive database with a set of variables describing the profiles and contexts in which candidates running as independents or with newly created parties (i.e., new entrants) have risen in Latin America. In the second part of the project students will be asked to collect and translate public speeches and programmatic platforms by the universe of presidential candidates who have ran for office in Latin America since the 1980s, and to analyze these sources using topic modelling among other natural language procedures for text analysis. These two parts of the project will provide students with an overview of the different stages involved in quantitative research designs: e.g., definition of coding procedures, data collection, data cleaning, text and data analysis, among others.
AY 2018-19
Select Projects:
Title: Citizen-State Interactions at Bureaucratic Frontlines
CPD Research Associate: Anustubh Agnihotri
CPD Undergraduate Fellows: Leila Hooshyar along with Anurag Aiyer & Ankita Mitra
The ability of the state to effectively respond to demands made by citizens has long term consequences for democratic practice and economic development(Mettler 2002; Pierson 1993; Kruks-Wisner 2018; Dal Bo and Finan 2016).The interaction between citizen and the state is a site where ideas around state efficacy and accountability are formed; citizenship is both “state induced and socially produced”(quote from Kruks-Wisner 2018, Page 29). Yet, we understand very little about how bureaucrats engage with citizens. My dissertation research adds to this research by focusing on the functioning of the tehsildars and patwaris, Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) (borrowing from Lipsky) in India who engage with citizens on a regular basis. I seek to understand how these agents of the state exercise their discretion at the micro-level during their day to day interactions with citizens. As part of my research I am putting together a dataset of bureaucratic transfers of more than 1000 bureaucrats over a 4 year period.
Specific role for the undergraduate: The Research fellows helped me download and clean the data from a public website and then create a dataset of transfers using a coding manual.
Title: The Wartime Experiences of Civic Leaders:Legacies of Civil War in Côte d’Ivoire
CPD Research Associate: Justine Davis
CPD Undergraduate Fellow: Luca Amato
Justine Davis, PhD candidate in political science, and Luca Amato, 2019 graduate of political science, worked together on a project entitled “the Wartime Experiences of Civic Leaders: Legacies of Civil War in Côte d’Ivoire”. The mentorship project entailed creating a large dataset of department-level variables across time in Côte d’Ivoire to facilitate a matching case-selection strategy for the research design employed in the study. A description of the project can be found here.
Title: Democracy in the era of political disillusionment: is moderation ever strategic for outsiders?
CPD Research Associate: Natalia Garbiras-Díaz
CPD Undergraduate Fellows: Elisabeth Early & Hugo Santiago
Outsider candidates have been present in politics around the globe for decades. The most well-known outsider candidates who have won office share a populist style and have adopted extreme positions on policy issues, both on the right and on the left of the political spectrum (e.g., Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, among others, including Donald Trump in the U.S.). This empirical observation has, in turn, led the literature on outsider candidates to focus almost exclusively on describing and studying the consequences of anti-establishment/extremist candidates (e.g., Levitsky et al. 2016; Carreras 2012; Serra 2018). However, these studies have overlooked important variation between outsider candidates. Notably, the last presidential elections in France, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, among other countries, all included moderate candidates running for office, who did not campaign on a populist style nor on extremist positions. This project seeks to fill in this gap by studying the strategic decisions adopted by candidates running as independents or with newly created parties (i.e., new entrants) in terms of where to locate along the policy dimension and which type of rhetoric to employ when appealing to voters.
Specific role for the undergraduate: Research fellows helped constructing an exhaustive database with a set of variables describing the profiles and contexts in which candidates running as independents or with newly created parties (i.e., new entrants) have risen around the world.
Title: Bang for the Buck – Reforms to Maximize Public Funding Outcomes in India
CPD Research Associate: Bhumi Purohit
CPD Undergraduate Fellow: Rudraveer Reddy
The book project undertakes an explanation of India’s Public Finance Management System and its implications on governance and public service delivery. The book highlights the current gaps in our understanding of funding outcomes and related variables in political economic studies.
Specific role for the undergraduate: Rudraveer Reddy helped edit the book manuscript and created a citation management system for references in the book to enable the creation of a bibliography.