QDR Qualitative Data Repository
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Negotiating formality: Informal sector, market, and state in Peru
No full textProject Summary: Street vendors are commonly considered to be prototypical informal workers in Latin America, escaping compliance with the state regulation of trade. Yet vendors with fixed posts in densely concentrated commercial areas belie the conventional dichotomous concept of formality/informality, as their activities are, in fact, regulated. Indeed, fixed-post vendors in central-city streets are engaged in a constant process of negotiating the terms of their engagement with the state. In the case of street vendors in Lima, negotiations over legal status and access to public space are a source of ongoing conflict between them and state officials, who pursue conflicting strategies of partial formalization throughout the era of neoliberal transition. This project explores the political roots of regulation in the informal economy, showing how policy contradictions at different levels of the state, and conflicts among street-vending organizations, produce a system of partial formalization. The research design for this project was organized around two main comparisons: (1) a comparison of the politics of street vending in two areas of commercial concentration in Lima; and (2) an over-time comparison of a single area, the garment district of Gamarra, over the course of three municipal administrations.
Data Abstract: The over-time comparison spans three municipal administrations (1992- 2002) in the district of La Victoria, where Gamarra is located. Among other data sources, the over-time comparison is based on an archive collected between October 2011 and September 2012, comprising over 1,000 pages on the evolution of street commerce in La Victoria, constructed over the course of a year of fieldwork. The archive includes newspaper clippings, magazines, newsletters, fliers, records from various street vending organizations in the district, records from attempts to implement key regulations in the mid-1990s, and a wealth of other materials that shed light on all dimensions of the politics of street vending. These data collectively form the only written record of the politics of street vending in the district chosen for study. In the case of by-laws, a small subset (ordinances only) are published in the official record (El Peruano), but other by-laws – including city council resolutions, mayoral decrees, etc. – were not published or archived by the district administration at the time of the research. In the case of street vending organizations, internal documents either do not typically exist or are not archived in any one place. Likewise, background documents relating to street trade – such as party platforms and newspaper clippings – are not typically centralized. The archive compiled as part of this project therefore represents a crucial counterpoint to the observational data collected through other means.
Files Description: The sources were organized into three main categories: laws and by-laws; organizations; and background documents. Within each category the documents collected were photocopied and organized chronologically around municipal administrations (1992-1995; 1995-1998; 1998-2002) to facilitate content analysis. A conventional content analysis approach was then used to analyze the archive. Coding categories were derived directly from the text and used to construct a database in Microsoft Access.</p
Interstate War Initiation and Termination (I-WIT) data set
No full textProject Summary:The Interstate War Initiation and Termination (I-WIT) data set was created to enable study of macro-historical change in war initiation and termination. I-WIT is based on the Correlates of War (COW) version 4 list of interstate wars, and contains most of the interstate wars in the COW list; those excluded were wars the researchers believe do not meet the COW criteria for interstate wars. For each war, research assistants (RAs) coded a host of variables relating to war initiation and termination, including whether each side issued a declaration of war, the political and military outcomes of the war (which are coded separately), and the nature of any agreement that concluded the war. One argument made in several publications based on these data (also part of a larger book project) is that the proliferation of codified international humanitarian law has created disincentives for states to admit that they are in a state of war. Declaring war or concluding a peace treaty would constitute an admission of being in a state of war. As international humanitarian law has proliferated and changed in character over the past 100 years or so, it has set the costs of compliance – and also the costs of finding a state to be out of compliance – very high. Thus, states avoid declaring war and concluding peace treaties to try to perpetrate a type of legal fiction – that they are not at war – to limit their liability for any violations of the laws of war.
Data Abstract: The data cover the period from 1816 to 2007 and span the entire world. Dozens of graduate and undergraduate RAs working between 2004 and 2010 compiled existing data from secondary sources and, when available online, primary sources to code variables listed and described in the coding instrument. RAs were given a coding instrument with a description and rules for coding each variable. Typically, they consulted both secondary and primary sources, although off-site archival sources were not consulted. They filled in a spreadsheet for each war with variable values, and produced a narrative report (henceforward, “narrative”) of 5-10 pages that gave background information on the war and also justified their coding. Each war was assigned to at least two RAs to check for inter-coder reliability. If there was disagreement between the first two RAs, a third RA was brought in to code discrepant variables for that war. Where possible, a 2/3 rule was followed in resolving discrepancies. Remaining discrepancies are addressed in the “discrepancy narrative,” which lists the discrepancies and documents final coding decisions.
Files Description: Some sources were scanned (e.g., declarations of war or peace treaties) but for the most part, RAs took notes on their assigned cases and produced their coding and narratives based on these notes. The coding instrument and the discrepancy narrative are included in the data documentation files, and all data files produced – including original codings that were discrepant with later codings – are included in the interest of allowing other researchers to make their own judgments as to the final coding decisions. A companion data set – C-WIT (Civil War Initiation and Termination) – is still under construction and thus not shared at this time.<p
Data for: “Pivotal deterrence and the chain gang: Sir Edward Grey’s ambiguous policy and the July Crisis,” in: Pivotal deterrence: Third-party statecraft and the pursuit of peace
No full textThis is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at: https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/sir-edward-greys-ambiguous-policy
Project Summary
This project is drawn from a larger study of pivotal deterrence policies – attempts by a third-party power to deter conflict among others while avoiding firm commitments to one side. The book chapter selected for activation focuses on Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy during the July crisis and the effects it had on the behavior of the major European powers—France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. This case was selected because it matched a particular “cell” in a typological framework, embodying a constellation of initial conditions and values on explanatory and control variables. The British July Crisis case is an instance in which the pivotal deterrer was a “peer” (in terms of its power relative to the target’s): it would be constrained in its ability to achieve leverage over the targets of its policy. The pivotal deterrer was also initially a player in the conflict, with secondary interests at stake: when the crisis started, only secondary British interests were at stake in the dispute between Serbia and Austria. These two factors, in some ways, “controlled” the case in the larger study’s comparative research design. In relation to that latter variable, the British case also captured theoretically important longitudinal change. Once the crisis escalated to near-war between Germany and France, then Britain’s vital interests were engaged. As Britain’s interests shifted over time, its approach to (and the effects of) its pivotal deterrence policy would be expected to change in certain ways anticipated by the theory. So the case analysis examines whether the policy changes that occurred were consistent with those expectations. This is also a “hard case” analysis, because the policy was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing war, and the deck was stacked against success by other theoretically important factors pointing toward war. The empirical analysis—using congruence testing and process tracing methods—shows, nevertheless, that the policy had intermediate effects on the other actors’ policies and actions that are consistent with the “isolation avoidance” dynamic posited in the pivotal deterrence theory (even though, in terms of its ultimate effect, it did not deter them from going to war). In short, the theorized causal mechanics of pivotal deterrence are revealed even in this hard case, where failure of the policy was in many ways over-determined. Finally, the case offers a “hoop test” of another component of the theory—the conditioning variable of the targets’ “alignment options”. When the targets of pivotal deterrence have strong alignment options, the theory expects that the pivotal deterrer will have little leverage with which to restrain them. In the British case, Germany and France had very strong alignment options embodied in their continental allies. Accordingly, the case analysis shows that these relationships indeed blunted Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy in ways that conform to the political dynamics pivotal deterrence failure posited in the theory.
Data Abstract
The data for the case analysis were collected from primary textual sources--published official collections of documents (British and German volumes of correspondence, the latter translated into English) and autobiographies—and secondary sources (synthetic histories, monographs, and articles). The author relied on secondary sources to develop the general narrative elements in the case, and to clarify competing perspectives on matters of controversy and on secondary histories in English based on work in the relevant documents and archives, to extract evidence revealing of internal deliberations in and relevant to decision process tracing of European countries from Great Britain to Russia in the months from July to August 1914.
Files Description
Data were initially collected from documents via note-taking and photocopying. The present effort to activate the sources involves additionally scanning the documents. The full page (or pages) on which quoted passages, or key evidence for causal process claims, appear are provided so that surrounding context is made transparent; specific passages that pertain to causal process arguments are highlighted by the author.
Logic of Annotation and Activation:
Which citations were activated and to what degree was based on the following logics: 1. Sourced active citations—at a minimum, for all official documents referenced in the chapter the full source information was provided; 2. Fully active citation—for all official documents and secondary sources from which primary process tracing evidence is quoted or referenced in the chapter. When the connection to the inference is not obvious, an annotated explanation is included. Annotation is also provided when the stipulated causal or historical claim is contested, with references to alternative sources.</p
The Argentine Supreme Court in press, 1995-1999
No full textProject Summary: The book that motivated and then drew on part of this data collection, High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2012), analyzes the strikingly different patterns of inter-branch interaction over economic governance that emerged in Argentina and Brazil during the two decades following regime transition. It advances an institutional account of that variation: the Court character thesis. Drawing on both rational choice and historical institutionalism, the author argues that a high court’s character shapes the way that it decides cases of crucial political significance and conditions the way elected leaders respond to its rulings, channeling inter-branch interactions into relatively enduring patterns. The book is grounded in a rich collection of empirical evidence gathered during 20 months of field research in Argentina and Brazil (2004-2005). The author conducted approximately 275 interviews in Spanish and Portuguese, including with more than 20 current and former high court justices; assembled a searchable electronic archive of 14,000 newspaper articles concerning the two high courts and their rulings; collected many types of primary data (e.g., public opinion data, high court opinions, etc.); and directly observed sessions of the Brazilian high court. The data project, assembled with the help of an extraordinary research assistant at UC Irvine, consists of a spreadsheet listing 2,037 newspaper articles concerning the Argentine Supreme Court that appeared in the Argentine daily La Nación during President Carlos Menem’s second term in office (1995-1999), an increasingly tumultuous time for Argentina and the court. While covering a shorter time period than the book, the data project covers more ground substantively, as it includes (1) every article that focused on a politically important case (in any policy area) before the Argentine Supreme Court, a ruling of the Court on such a case, or the aftermath of one of the Court’s rulings on such a case (these cases were systematically selected employing a methodology specifically designed for the project), (2) every other article regarding the court deemed relevant to understanding high court politics in Argentina during the time period under study.
Data Abstract: In the research project to which this data collection is attached, one way of measuring the political salience of cases considered by the Argentine high court between 1984 and 2003 was to count the number of mentions in a major national newspaper (in the case of Argentina, La Nación). (The other two indicators were mentions in scholarly sources, and mentions in 25 semi-structured interviews.) The articles thus needed to be selected very carefully. In Argentina, with the help of two RAs, the author developed a systematic methodology for selecting and capturing (via digital camera) relevant articles. She worked with the RAs until she and they could read every page of every section of every issue of an entire month of the newspaper, independently of each other, and select the same articles 80% of the time. Almost immediately, the author and her RAs realized that they were missing a lot of information by only selecting articles focused on a particular Argentine Supreme Court case. So, they created a parallel system (and another form) so that they could also take a digital picture of and capture bibliographic information for all of the non-case-related articles (“relevantes”). The centerpiece of the data project is the Excel spreadsheet listing 2,037 newspaper articles concerning the Argentine Supreme Court that appeared in the Argentine daily La Nación between 1995 and 1999. The spreadsheet has 10 columns, including (A) the code the author assigned to the article; (B/D) the title; (C) whether the article was a sub-article of a larger article; (E/F) author; (G) date of article; (H) name of the case on which the article focused (if any); and (I/J) the URL (available on La Nación’s web site for all articles beginning in 1996).
Files Description: The data project consists of six files (all written in Spanish with the exception of the labeling on the spreadsheet): (1) The spreadsheet described above (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.CLEANED); (2/3) Two Word documents in which the Court cases covered in articles appearing in La Nación between 1995 and 1999 are listed in chronological order, together with the codes for all of the newspaper articles (identified by their form number) that were associated with each case (all of which are included in the spreadsheet); there are many more articles listed in the spreadsheet than are listed in these Word documents because the spreadsheet also contains all of the articles the research team deemed to be “relevantes” (described above) (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Cases 1995-1997; Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Cases 1998-1999); (4) Sample Newspaper Form – the form that the author’s RAs filled out in Argentina as they systematically selected newspaper articles to include in the sample; each article has one accompanying form; scanning of these for each article included in the spreadsheet is in course (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Sample Newspaper Form); (5) Sample photo – the author and a team of RAs took a digital picture of every newspaper article listed in the spreadsheet; the author is preparing for posting to QDR a digital image of the articles in the spreadsheet for which URLs are missing (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Sample photo); (6) A description (in the form of instructions for RAs) of the methodology RAs used to select the newspaper articles in the spreadsheet (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Selection Methodology)<p
Democracies and dictatorships in Latin America: Political actors, 1944-2010
No full textProject Summary: The book for which this data collection was generated seeks to explain why democracies and authoritarian regimes have emerged and then survived or fallen in Latin America from 1945 to 2005. The more specific goal of the data collection is to assess the impact of normative orientations towards democracy and radical policy preferences on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns. Most theories postulate that regimes survive or fall depending on the behavior of political actors. As the authors tested hypotheses based on competing theories, they became convinced that actors’ normative preferences about democracy and dictatorship and their policy preferences were indeed crucial variables to understand why democracies and dictatorships emerge and then survive or break down. They found that normative regime preferences and radicalism, together with international conditions, are the most important predictors for democratic emergence and survival in Latin America.
Data Abstract: The absence of systematic historical measures of normative regime preferences (ideological support for democracy or authoritarianism) and of policy radicalism for major political actors led the authors to commission a set of reports covering all Latin American countries after World War II up to 2010 The reports were produced between 2008 and 2013 with the help of 19 research assistants (RAs) by archival research and synthesis of existing material (notes based on secondary sources subsequently integrated into country reports). The data collection includes all of these reports as well as the coding rules guiding their production. For eighteen of the twenty countries, the coding of political actors covers the period from 1944 until 2010; for Argentina and El Salvador reports reach back to 1916 and 1927, respectively. The data are organized by country (documents for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela) and by administration (sections within documents). For most administrations, a limited number of actors (between two and ten) were the decisive political players. The list always includes the president (except for a few puppet presidents), political parties, trade unions, military factions, social movements, and other powerful organizations. For 290 presidential administrations, the dataset has 1460 actors including 573 parties, party coalitions, and party factions; 327 presidents and the organizations that are relatively subordinate to them (such as their parties under democracies and almost always the military under military dictatorships); 175 militaries, military factions, and military organizations; 82 business organizations; 56 guerrilla organizations; 53 popular and civil society organizations; 52 labor unions and federations; 52 powerful individuals who were not the president; 27 churches; 22 social movements; 16 paramilitary groups; and a smaller number of other kinds of actors. The authors identified the actors’ political alignments vis-à-vis the incumbent president by coding whether they were the government or government allies, members of the opposition, or neutral or divided with regards to the administration. Based on multiple historical sources, country reports discuss and code three variables for each political actor: its normative preference for democracy, its normative preference for dictatorship, and its policy radicalism/moderation. The coding rules for normative preferences for democracy and dictatorship are designed to distinguish between instrumental and normative reasons for supporting regimes.
Files Description: Twenty country reports, divided into sections corresponding to the administrations in office during 1944-2010, with additional administrations for Argentina (1916-1930) and El Salvador (1927-1943). Each section (administration or period for long-lasting administrations) contains a sub-section for the actors mentioned above. An additional table summarizes the profile of all political actors discussed for each administration period. For each actor, the report provides brief narratives involving qualitative assessment of three attributes: (1) The actor’s normative support for democracy. The actor’s normative support for dictatorship; (2) The actor’s degree of radicalism on policy issues; (3) Historical sources referenced for each document are listed at the end of each respective country report.<p/
Data for: “Russia: The politics and psychology of overcommitment,” in: The ideology of the offensive: Military decision making and the disasters of 1914
No full textThis is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at: https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/ideology-of-the-offensive
Project Summary
Data for Chapter 7 in "The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914" (Cornell University Press, 1984) The book from which this chapter is taken asks why the major European continental powers all began the First World War with offensive military strategies that failed to accomplish their political or military objectives and that helped to cause the war by increasing the insecurity of all these states. The author argues that the offensive bias in 1914 mainly stemmed from the preference of professional military organizations. Offensive strategies and doctrines enhanced their prestige and autonomy by purporting to create decisive military solutions to the paramount political problems of the state. The weakness of civilian oversight of professional militaries before 1914 unleashed this bias. The larger conceptual purpose of the book was to explore how strategists in any era might come to believe that security could be best achieved by destabilizing offensive means, including striking first. Chapters on Germany and France illustrate these main arguments of the book very directly. The Russian case manifests less of a systematic, long-term bias for the offensive. It explores the causes of a shift in Russian military strategy between 1910 and 1914 from a cautious, largely defensive war plan to a highly overcommitted plan for simultaneous offensives on three fronts. Two background factors – the growing strength of the Russian army and the tightening of the Russo-French alliance in response to Germany’s offensive war plan – help to explain the evolution of Russia’s strategy in a more offensive direction, but these considerations do not account for the disastrously overcommitted excesses of this move. The author emphasizes three explanations for the overcommitted offensives: (1) bureaucratic compromises in which different military bureaucratic factions each got the offensive that it wanted, (2) oversimplified decision processes that paid insufficient attention to logistical feasibility, and (3) a psychological bias for seeing the necessary as possible. Chapter 7 on Russia was chosen for active citation because the research for it added considerable information not widely available in the West, and because the footnotes take considerable pains to explain the connection between details of evidence and the arguments of the chapter.
Data Abstract
The evidence for the chapter comprises many primary sources and several Soviet scholars’ archival research. At the time of the data collection (in the 1980s), however, the author was denied access to the Soviet military history archive, which some Western scholars have subsequently been able to exploit in the post-Soviet period. One qualification the author makes concerns the general insufficiency of data in the Russian case at the time of his writing (as compared to the German and French). Although the chronology of the Russian planning process is well documented, the motivations for some of the changes in the war plan are not. The explanations presented in memoirs and published documents tend to be superficial. Soviet historiography had not been particularly incisive, and Western scholars at the time (like Snyder himself) did not have access to archival material on military planning. Consequently, the interpretations of Russian decision making are not definitive. Nonetheless, he considered using evidence from a past but critical period to be the major advantage of using historical rather than contemporary cases to study the sources of bias in strategic policy making, which remain similar in the present despite changes in military technology. FILES DESCRIPTION: The key documents used for citation activation come from published collections of diplomatic materials of WWI and Soviet historiography from the early part of the 20th century. For example, a critical source used on numerous occasions is a 1926 study by Andrei M. Zaionchkovskii, a general and military historian, who commanded the Russian 30th Army Corps during WWI, of the Russian planning for the war. The memoirs of Yuri Danilov, chief of operations of the Russian Imperial Army general-headquarters during the period, serve as another key source of evidence. Additional important sources used contain Soviet army publications of archival maps and plans and studies conducted by Soviet military academies’ scholars. Where possible, the author cites the English-language versions of books (e.g., the reminiscences of Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov, published in London in 1928), but many of the source materials are in Russian, German and French, and the author provides translations for many relevant excerpts. The source files are scanned versions of relevant pages cited from close to 80 individual publications.
Logic of Annotation and Activation
The author’s criteria for activating citations were whether the source material had a bearing on key arguments or historical interpretations, and whether the rarity or intrinsic interest of the materials warranted making them more easily accessible to researchers – even in cases where the materials might have played a relatively smaller role in the argument. As in the footnotes of the book itself, the author sometimes included English-language material for general background, even when it was not as directly on point as the Russian sources. Additionally, a few of the original sources used for this research conducted in the mid-1980s could not be tracked down for logistical reasons.</p
Data for: 'Does commercialization undermine the benefits of decentralization for local services provision? Evidence from Mexico’s urban water and sanitation sector'
No full textThis is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.
Please use the Chrome browser with the Hypothesis extension installed to view the annotations.
Project Summary
This study evaluates experiences in three Mexican cities to assess whether decentralization and commercialization practices have resulted in improved water and sanitation services. It finds that commercialization has increased social conflict surrounding urban services provision, and that local institutional constraints further undermine mayors’ ability to adopt politically contentious policies. This study examines Mexico, a country that has experienced an extensive amount of both decentralization and neoliberal policies, and selects the water and sanitation sector, which 79 percent of all Mexican mayors list as the most important municipal responsibility. Through process tracing the author examines how two-macro-level processes—decentralization and neoliberal commercialization—interacted with the political and institutional context within Mexican municipalities to disincentivize the adoption of cost recovery, adversely affecting service outcomes. The causal leverage of this study is gained from “within-case” analysis of three of the largest urban centers within Mexico State (Estado de México): Naucalpan, Nezahualcóyotl (Neza), and Toluca. As the country’s economic powerhouse, Mexico State is a critical case for examining whether decentralization and commercialization policies have helped improve public services in Mexico more broadly. Such a wealthy state would be the least likely to have public services deficiencies, so if service problems are identified within Mexico State’s urban centers, they are more likely to be seen throughout the country in poorer and less industrialized regions. This article presents data collected as part of a larger research project on the politics of urban services reform in Mexico after the “top-down” implementation of decentralization and commercialization reforms. This larger research project, a subnational comparative research design, entailed extensive field research in more than nine cities located in the states of Mexico State, Guanajuato and Veracruz. The primary research question was: under what conditions do mayors successfully circumvent political and institutional barriers to services reform and adopt commercialization policies in the water and sanitation sector?
Data Abstract
The collected data cover the period from 1997 to 2012 and were gathered during extensive field research in 2007-2008 and 2012 that entailed 180 in-depth interviews, data collection from internal government documents, newspaper articles and archival material. Interviews lasted from one to four hours, and interview subjects were identified using snowball sampling. Almost all interviews were conducted in person at municipal, state and federal level of government with government employees, elected officials, policymakers, business leaders, consultants, engineers and academics. The author also observed meetings with government officials, the day-to-day office work of water utilities and also went on site visits with water utility engineers being interviewed to illustrate the conditions of the infrastructure network. In addition, archival research was conducted at the Archivo Historico del Agua in Mexico City, and in electronic archives in the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (exploring the international loan history of Mexico’s water and sewage sector as well as diagnostic studies of the sector). Extensive research was conducted to identify all secondary source material written in Spanish about the cities under study, their local government, economies, party politics, democratization experiences, protests and collective action surrounding reform policies, and technical aspects of the water and sewage sector. This included extensive compilation and analysis of primary source documents – e.g., government performance data – at three tiers of government, including occasional reports from consultants or the private sector and newspaper coverage for the periods under study in local Spanish-language newspapers. Additionally, transparency requests were made to the government regarding the number and content of formal protest and petitions against government regarding the policies under study.
Almost all of interviews were tape recorded; of those, approximately 30 percent were transcribed, while the remaining 70 percent were summarized. Extensive notes were taken during and after each interview. For observations, notes were taken after events. For newspaper articles, information was scanned and later notes were taken on the content of the information (including timelines, and the construction of comparable categories of analysis for each case in table/chart form in order to identify the chain of events). For transparency requests sent to the government, notes were not taken or rewritten.<p
Data for: “Grassroots bureaucracy: Intergovernmental relations and popular mobilization in Brazil's AIDS policy sector”
No full textThis is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website
Please use the Chrome browser with the Hypothesis extension installed to view the annotations.
Project Summary
Brazil stands out as an international standard bearer for good governance in AIDS prevention. Civil-society mobilization is generally acknowledged to be a key driver of this continued success. This broader research project from which this article is drawn seeks to explain how Brazil’s civic associations have become central figures in the negotiation, development, and implementation of nearly every AIDS policy decision at both the national and the subnational level. The project attributes the continued success of Brazil’s AIDS movement to the active role of the state, both in helping new working-class organizations overcome socioeconomic challenges to mobilization and in expanding the number of strategies available to them for achieving political influence. By showing how the Brazilian state fostered autonomous civic organization and mobilization around AIDS policy, this research project addresses a critical question in the context of one of the most important development challenges of our day. The research project also makes an important contribution to the literature on civil-society development, modifying prevailing theories that focus on the state as an obstacle to political mobilization. Brazil is highly privatized and the most decentralized country in Latin America, factors that the literature suggests should fragment populist interests. Yet Brazilian AIDS associations are among the most scaled up and politically influential popular nongovernmental organizations in the region. In closely analyzing this unexpected case of broad civic engagement, the author identifies new factors that shape popular organization and mobilization in the era of neoliberal democracies, centering on the resources and channels of access to political power provided by the state. The study contributes to the broad social scientific endeavor of theory-building by reformulating theories of interest organizations so as to account for new cases of sustained civic mobilization in Latin America.
Data Abstract
The evidence presented in this project draws on original data collected during nineteen months (from January 2007 to May 2010) of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Brasilia, combining qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. Qualitative interviews and observation provided richly detailed information about specific events and allowed for the discovery of unanticipated themes. The author conducted over 100 in-depth, open-ended interviews with the civil society leaders, bureaucrats, politicians, and World Bank officials directly involved in AIDS policy development in Brazil. She also engaged in participant observation of over 40 policy-making meetings with AIDS-sector bureaucrats and civil society leaders from around Brazil. In addition, she conducted extensive archival research uncovering a wealth of unpublished government data, media reports, monographs, and activist memoirs. To complement the various forms of qualitative data collection, between February and May 2010 the author conducted an electronic survey of 123 civic AIDS organizations in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The survey generated a unique dataset of civic AIDS organizations in those states, with information from over one hundred questions on their constituencies, sources of income, organizational networks, political affiliations, and major political activities. The author also compiled and analyzed a national dataset of civic AIDS organizations in Brazil, based on a 2002 questionnaire conducted by the Brazilian Ministry of Health, allowing for an even broader set of observations. All in all, the data cover present information of AIDS policy across Brazil for the period from 1983 to 2010. The main source for policy analyses and monographs used was the Center for Documentation and Resources (CEDOC), an archive housed in ABIA (The Brazilian Inter-Disciplinary AIDS Association). Unpublished government documents from the national AIDS bureaucracy were obtained by making requests to government informants. Finally, the author collected media reports about AIDS in Brazil using the internet search tool Factiva.
Interviews after 2008 were audio recorded, and transcriptions were made of most (although not all) of them. Notes were taken both during and after all interactions with interview subjects. Some archival sources, such as policy briefs and monographs from CEDOC, were collected as hard copies. With the exception of a few historic photos in books that were unavailable for purchase, these sources were photographed or scanned. Media reports were collected as electronic documents. Government documents were collected as a mix of hardcopy and electronic sources. Few of the hardcopies have been scanned. The national catalog of AIDS NGOs has been scanned and also converted into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Logic of Annotation and Activation
Citations are activated using the four criteria for assessment suggested in the Guide to Active Citation: centrality of the (evidence-based) claim, importance of the data source, contested or controversial nature of the (evidence-based) claim, and contested or controversial nature of the data source.<p/
Brokers, voters, and clientelism: The puzzle of distributive politics
No full textProject Summary
This project addresses the relationship between electoral strategies and distributive politics, in particular, between electoral strategies and clientelism. The authors distinguish clientelism from other forms of distributive politics in two ways. First, clientelist resources are targeted towards particular groups of voters, and are not distributed indiscriminately. Second, receiving clientelist resources is contingent upon supporting the party that is distributing the resources. Thus, electoral support from voters who receive clientelist goods is coerced. Beginning with these two properties, which are located within a broader taxonomy of distributive politics, the authors address following questions: How does non-programmatic politics, and especially clientelism, work? What causes shifts away from clientelism and toward other, non-broker-mediated distributive strategies? Which kinds of distributive politics are consistent with the norms of democracy, which are inconsistent, and why? The research design utilizes a multi-layer mix of strategies and relies on a variety of data sources. The authors conduct sample surveys of voters in Argentina, Venezuela, and India, and use publicly available individual data from Mexico to make inferences about the kinds of voters whom political machines target. The authors draw upon a vast and rigorous secondary literature and offer what they believe to be the broadest empirical review of ecological studies of distributive politics yet produced. They use secondary historical materials to make arguments about the demise of at least some forms of clientelist politics in several of today’s advanced democracies. Generally then, the authors test different aspects of the theories developed in the book using different research designs, unique datasets on voters, brokers, and leaders, and qualitative fieldwork. They seek to overcome the limitations associated with each individual strategy by triangulating evidence from a variety of sources.
Data Abstract
The full project data consist of recorded surveys of city council members and brokers who work for the city council members. The surveys contain both open- and closed-ended questions and were collected in person, with the help of research assistants between 2008 and 2013. The respondents were selected using a clustered random sampling design. Four Argentinian provinces – Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Misiones, and San Luis – were selected non-randomly. Within each province municipalities were randomly selected; within each selected municipality, city council members were randomly selected and surveyed. At the end of each of these surveys, the city council members were asked to provide a list of brokers whom they employ and whom they know by name, and then asked if a proportion of the brokers could be surveyed. One-third or one-fifth of these brokers were randomly selected from these lists. Interviews took place in city council offices and in any location that was convenient for the respondent. These data were consulted because the project hinges upon organizational challenges for political machines. In particular, the theory derives analytic leverage by focusing upon a principal-agent problem that arises between party leaders and brokers: brokers target more core voters than is ideal from the party leaders’ perspective, and brokers privately consume resources that could earn votes for the party. Testing this theory requires data that measure the behavior and decisions of brokers, which is what the survey provides.
Files Description
The original organization of the data reflected the sampling strategy used to select the survey respondents into the sample. It was organized first in municipal clusters and then in clusters around a city council member. The latter clusters consist of a city council member and her brokers.
Due to the large number of interviews only a random sample of these interviews could be transcribed and shared. These data are shared because they provide the bulk of the qualitative data for the project, and because they provide a rare collection of surveys from a probability sample of brokers. These data contain anonymized transcriptions of survey interviews that were conducted with political brokers from 6 municipalities in the broader metropolitan region of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The respondents consist of city council members and brokers who work for them. The survey interviews consist of closed and open-ended questions, which ask the respondents about their political careers, the politics of their localities, and their political parties. The survey also asks the brokers to respond to hypothetical situations regarding resource distribution and their abilities to draw inferences about voters. In total the respondents were asked to respond to 43 questions. Although many questions were closed-ended, the transcriptions contain many details that were not captured with the quantitative data generated from the survey. These transcriptions come from the larger project, in which 800 political brokers were drawn as a probability sample and surveyed from four Argentine provinces: Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Misiones, and San Luis. In Buenos Aires, 255 respondents were surveyed from 10 municipalities. These transcriptions consist of interviews with 110 of the 255 respondents and come from 6 municipalities that were randomly selected from the original 10 in the sample.
To share these data we randomly selected recorded survey interviews to be transcribed, and we anonymized the transcriptions. The original survey was conducted in 10 municipalities that were randomly selected from the 24 municipalities that form the broader metropolitan region of Bueno Aires. The municipalities that were selected for this project consist of 6 municipalities that were randomly selected from the 10 municipalities in the survey sample. We transcribed all of the recorded interviews in 5 of the municipalities. In the 6th municipality, 17 randomly selected interviews were transcribed. We did not transcribe all of the interviews in the 6th municipality due to budgetary limitations. In total, this deposit contains 110 interviews of the 255 respondents who were surveyed. After we completed the transcriptions we anonymized the surveys. The decisions that guided the anonymization process are recorded in a protocol that is included in the deposit.
Originally, we were going to cluster the transcriptions by municipality. But, while anonymizing the surveys, we determined that this would create too much risk of revealing the identities of the respondents. So now the files just have a randomly assigned number and they are not organized by municipality. The B or C after the number in each file name designates whether the respondent was a Broker or Council member, respectively.
The other data from the project consist of open-ended interviews, quantitative data sets, and historical analysis. Many of these data were used to test the theories of the project with different populations that consist of voters in Argentina and populations in other countries and time periods. The open-ended interviews provided context for the analysis. All of the quantitative data are already publicly available and the historical data are available through secondary sources. The open-ended interviews could potentially be shared, but they consist of a convenience sample, are fewer in number, and are not comparable across interviews, which may limit their analytic value for other researchers.</p
Consumer subsidies in post-crisis Argentina
No full textProject Summary: Developing countries devote significant resources to lowering consumer prices for basic goods and services such as food and electricity. This article explains the political logic of the adoption and growth of broad-based consumer subsidies. The authors argue that consumer subsidies often constitute policy traps—ad hoc measures to address unexpected problems that quickly become entrenched. At first, subsidizing consumer prices is an affordable means of helping the population cope with income shocks. Over time, however, environmental pressures and fears of political backlash against repeal reinforce one another, increasing the fiscal burden subsidies impose and dramatically raising the political cost of program exit. This framework is used to analyze the meteoric growth and deep entrenchment of utilities subsidies in post-crisis Argentina. Puzzlingly, in Argentina subsidies grew despite the private provision of subsidized services—making it difficult for the government to claim credit—even in sectors with weakly organized interests.
Data Abstract: The main sources of qualitative data used for identifying the relevant causal process observations are anonymous interviews with key informants, newspaper archives, secondary literature, public opinion surveys, and papers by business associations. The article also relies significantly on quantitative data. These include time-series data on the crucial variables (levels of spending on subsidy programs, labor costs of public utility providers, geographic targeting of subsidies), as well as key statistics that strengthen inference (e.g., critical moments of change in the price of imported gas, levels of investment of urban bus providers, or levels of public support for the subsidy program).
Files Description: The shared material is divided into several clusters, each including a uniform type of data (e.g. spreadsheets with datasets on urban bus transportation subsidy programs; newspaper archive). Each cluster is composed of a dataset (or several datasets) and a Data Supplement file. The project also includes a Documentation Data Supplement for each cluster, as well as a comprehensive Introductory Data Supplement listing all the files.</p