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The rise of ethnic politics in Latin America
No full textProject Summary: This research, which was eventually published in a 2012 book by Cambridge University Press entitled The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America, focused on the emergence of indigenous parties in Latin America. Specifically, it sought to explain why some parties based in the indigenous population succeeded while others failed. The study focused on the three South American countries with the largest indigenous populations--Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru--but a comparative chapter examined the fate of indigenous parties in the rest of Latin America as well. The central argument of this study is that indigenous-based parties have succeeded in recent years by using inclusive ethnic and populist appeals to reach out to whites and mestizo as well as indigenous people. Indigenous parties, unlike many other ethnic parties, have managed to win support across ethnic lines because the long history of racial mixing in Latin America blurred ethnic boundaries and reduced ethnic polarization.
Data Abstract: This study used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews, party documents, journalistic accounts, surveys of public opinion and municipal-level census and electoral data. The data consist of notes in Spanish from interviews with prominent party leaders, legislators, interest group representatives, government officials, and pollsters. I selected interviewees who were deemed to have extensive knowledge of the elections and the parties involved in them and the interest groups that supported them. I was particularly interested in interviewees who were knowledgeable about or involved with the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, Pachakutik in Ecuador, the Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP) in Peru, and Winaq in Guatemala. The interviews were conducted in 10 summer research trips to Latin America between 2002 and 2008. The interviews were unstructured in nature and were conducted by the author.</p
Data for “Registered nurses’ perceptions of family caregivers to patients with heart failure: A focus group interview study.”
No full text
Project Summary: This qualitative study explores registered nurses’ perceptions about the situation of family caregivers to patients with heart failure, and registered nurses’ interventions, in order to improve family caregivers’ situation.
Data Abstract: Shared data include anonymized transcripts of focus group interviews and the qualitative content analysis of these interviews. Six focus group interviews were held with 23 registered nurses in three hospitals and three primary health care centers in one county in Sweden in 2014. Two content areas were identified by the a priori study aims. Four categories and nine sub-categories emerged in the analysis process. The content area “Family caregivers' situation” includes two categories: “To be unburdened” and “To comprehend the heart failure condition and its consequences”. The content area “Interventions to improve family caregivers' situation” includes two categories: “Individualized support and information” and “Bridging contact”. Registered nurses perceive family caregivers' situation as burdensome, characterized by worry and uncertainty. In the primary health care centers, the continuity and security of a registered nurse as a permanent health care contact may be a sustainable intervention to mitigate family caregivers' worry and uncertainty. In the nurse-led heart failure clinics in hospitals, registered nurses can provide family caregivers with the opportunity of involvement in their relative's health care and address congruence and relationship quality within the family through the use of "Shared care" and/or "Family-centered care". Registered nurses consider it necessary to have a coordinated individual care plan as a basis for collaboration between the county council and the municipality.
Researchers involved in the project: Annelie K. Gusdal (Principal Investigator), School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna, Sweden Designed the study, collected data, transcribed recorded data, performed major part of analysis and manuscript preparation. Karin Josefsson - School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna, Sweden and Faculty of Caring Science, Work Life and Social Welfare, University of Borås, Sweden Designed the study, verified transcriptions, collaborated in data analysis and manuscript preparation. Eva Thors Adolfsson - Centre for Clinical Research, Uppsala University, County Council of Västmanland, Västerås, Sweden and Department of Primary Health Care, Västmanland County Hospital, Sweden Designed the study, verified transcriptions, collaborated in data analysis and manuscript preparation. Lene Martin - School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna, Sweden and School of Health Sciences, City University, London, UK Designed the study, verified transcriptions, collaborated in data analysis and manuscript preparation
Using participatory approaches to assess the acceptability of surveillance systems: The case of bovine tuberculosis in Belgium
No full textProject Summary: Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) surveillance in Belgium is essential to maintain the officially free status and to preserve animal and public health. An evaluation of the system is thus needed to ascertain the surveillance provides a precise description of the current situation in the country. The evaluation should assess stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations about the system due to the fact that the acceptability has an influence on the levels of sensitivity and timeliness of the surveillance system. The objective of the study was to assess the acceptability of the bTB surveillance in Belgium, using participatory tools and the OASIS flash tool (‘analysis tool for surveillance systems’). For the participatory process, focus group discussions and individual interviews were implemented with representatives involved with the system, both from cattle and wildlife part of the surveillance.
Data Abstract: The shared data are anonymized transcripts of participatory interviews implemented in Belgium in the frame of the evaluation of the bovine tuberculosis surveillance system. Participants to the interviews were selected according to their role in the Belgium bovine tuberculosis surveillance system (e.g. private veterinarian, farmer) and to their willingness to take part to such a study.</p
Data for: The last mile problem: Activists, advocates and the struggle for justice in domestic courts
No full textProject Summary: Legal and human rights norms against violations of the right to physical integrity are clearly defined and established in all democracies. Implementing these well-established legal norms – traversing the “last mile” from written law to practice – has proved to be a tenacious problem, frustrating policymakers, scholars and citizens. What stands in the way of the successful protection of this right and the adjudication of those who commit acts of lethal violence? The article, which this data deposit supplements, examines the interactions between organized citizen groups, their allies and state investigators as a window into understanding the power relationships and mechanisms that produce both legal progress and inertia. I use original data to address one important part of the last mile problem: the judicial fate of cases of homicides and disappearances in domestic courts. Employing a least likely research design in two democracies struggling with high rates of lethal violence and impunity, Mexico and Colombia, I explore whether civil society actors are able to drive judicial progress in lower courts under these adverse circumstances.
Data Abstract: To these ends, I present original data from Mexico and Colombia at the national, sub-national, organizational and individual level. Within each level of analysis, I ask why some cases of homicides and disappearances are investigated and enter the judicial pipeline while the majority languish. In order to test the hypothesis that cases that are the focus of NGOs and civil society groups’ organizing and advocacy efforts will be relatively more successful than average cases, I focus on NGOs that accept cases based on the category of the lethal violence (disappearance, homicide, enforced disappearance) rather than the individual merits of the case (strong evidence, sympathetic victim, potential for important legal precedent). This allows me to isolate the effects of their intervention at the case level. Triangulating among statistical evidence, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic evidence, I find that cases that are the target of civil society action are more than twice as likely to show evidence of investigatory activity than the average case reported to the state. These civil society efforts are not sufficient, however, as most accompanied cases do not show significant judicial progress.
Survey: Who turns to NGOs or civil society organizations in times of life-threatening crisis? I addressed this question through a randomized person-to-person survey conducted in rural, urban and mixed areas throughout Mexico. The survey also ensured the interview respondents were balanced according to the level of violence in their state. The survey was administered by Buendía & Laredo, S.C., a statistical firm headquartered in Mexico. The survey employed a multistage area probability sample design, and was conducted between July 5th and 8th, 2012. Dr. Sandra Ley and Dr. Cassy L. Dorff were the lead researchers in designing the overall survey instrument.
I asked “if you were a victim of a crime in which your life was at risk, who would you notify?” The respondents could rank three answers amongst seven possible responses: the police or the attorney general’s office; the church or religious community; an NGO or social leader in your community; a relative; a neighbor, a friend; or other. 111 of 1,000 respondents indicated that they would notify “an NGO or social leader in your community” first, second or third. Were these respondents different than the larger sample of respondents? Roughly the same number, 110 respondents, indicated that they would notify the church or religious community. While almost 80 percent, 787 respondents, indicated that they would go to the police at some point, only 38 percent indicated that they would to the police first.
NGO Data: I worked with a Nuevo León-based NGO to construct a database of all cases of disappearances that they had received during a four-year period (2009-2012). I personally reviewed hand-written case files, recording all of the demographic information contained in these files. The omissions in this data file are because this information was not recorded at the time that the disappearance was recorded. This most likely resulted from the family member of the victim deciding not to share this information, though it could be because the person conducting the intake did not document the response to the questions.
I reviewed the case files for all those who had reported more than 1,000 cases of disappearances during this period whenever possible, and compared them to the individuals continually and actively involved in advocating for the 53 cases with the NGO. I used these data to answer the question: How were the victims’ relatives who chose to engage in ongoing advocacy demographically different from those who did not?
While people who go to an NGO may be similar to the larger population, not everyone who reports their case to an NGO will end up benefitting from their advocacy. In both of the Mexican advocacy organizations I studied, cases only receive the benefits of advocacy if the family members who reported the case to the NGO are active and continuously participate in advocacy activities. In the case of the Nuevo León-based NGO, despite documenting more than 1,000 cases of disappearances and homicides, only 53 of these cases had been advocated for by the victims’ relatives as of 2013. If those participating with the NGO are demographically different from the cases that were registered by the NGO, this could introduce bias into the findings. These data help us gain leverage on this question.</p
Data for: “Democratic and judicial stagnation,” in: Pathways to judicial power in transitional states: Perspectives from African courts
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/democratic-and-judicial-stagnation
Broader research project overview
Contemporary expressions of judicial empowerment, this book argues, are the product of multiple causes linked together in a historical sequence. The puzzle I grapple with in this book is the presence of intermittently high levels of judicial empowerment in Uganda and Malawi and weak levels of judicial empowerment in Tanzania. All three cases exhibit high levels of neopatrimonial rule and elite insecurities and high levels of interference. I argue that evidence of higher levels of judicial empowerment in Uganda and Malawi, compared to Tanzania, is best explained through reference to the critical junctures. These critical junctures have helped shape the internal dynamics of the institutions, which in turn strengthen or weaken the ability of the courts to resist interference and maintain decision-making autonomy. Courts have evolved as the result of particular historical struggles and pathways. The footprints of colonialism, authoritarian dictators, and elite-led transitions are reflected in contemporary institutions.
The book finds that high levels of interference do not necessarily correlate with judicial weakness. Despite intense attacks on judicial independence, the courts have sustained some autonomy in Malawi and Uganda. Judicial decision making acts as a feedback loop, and depending on the degree of institutional strength (i.e., levels of support, solid leadership, strong institutional protections), courts will then shape future strategies against interference.
The book identifies seven ways in which judges construct their own power:
Through decisionmaking, signaling to both the government and opposition
Through the formation of strategic off-bench alliances
Through the emergence of a courageous judicial culture
Judicial leadership is critical
Speed at which judges handle and dispose of cases
Judges frame their decisions beyond the mere legality of the question
Deep pool of potential judicial personnel
In sum, examining the pathways to judicial empowerment allows us to reveal critical moments of change, but also to identify the iterative effects of regime and institution interaction. In other words, judicial empowerment is not simply a reflection of the route or path taken, but of the cumulative effects of institutional layering over time.
Methods
The primary method of measuring the dependent variable – judicial empowerment - is an examination of politically salient cases. Politically salient cases were identified through interviews, newspaper coverage, and selected secondary literature.
I collected reported cases in the United States (Harvard University) and the United Kingdom (School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library). In addition, the Africalaw database incorporates Tanzania and Uganda from 1999 to the present. More recently, the Africalii project has collected cases in all three countries. In the field I found that the only official record is the handwritten court registry. In Malawi, I collected data from the court register. Tanzania has national law reports through 1997. However, as my research on Tanzania progressed, it became evident that the editorial board was alleged by several informants to have been highly politicized. Finally, Uganda has not published a law report since 1957. But old case files were inaccessible due to limited physical access. In Uganda, case files are stored in the basement of the High Court in Kampala. The room is now so full, it is impossible to open the door to the storage facility. Despite these challenges, I was able to obtain a close to complete universe of what I term “politically significant cases.” Analyzing the universe of significant political cases, and conducting a close textual analysis of the actual decisions, have led to important insights that might not be gained through simply counting pro- or anti-government decisions.
The majority of fieldwork was conducted from August 2006 to July 2007. Second trips to Malawi and Tanzania took place during the summer of 2009. While conducting field research, I also collected archival research at newspaper offices, as this was important for piecing together timelines and identifying important cases. Finally, the last major resource for my analysis was interviews. I conducted interviews with legal scholars and lawyers, international donors, civil society activists, and most importantly with judges in all three countries. I interviewed several high court judges and at least one constitutional/supreme court judge in every country. The interviews were semi-structured to allow for comparison among the respondents, but not so rigidly as to shut off the possibility of gleaning information I had not previously considered. The ultimate goal was not to interview every past and present high court justice, but to garner enough information to discern both behavioral and attitudinal patterns.
Through the use of snowball techniques, I interviewed more than sixty informants in the field. One of the problems with relying on referrals was that people often connected me to individuals they believed would tell me what I wanted to hear. This often included the more outspoken and assertive judges, for example. So in addition I approached many individuals not through referral, but based on prior desk research. The interviews were conducted anonymously, and ranged in length from 30 to 160 minutes. Interviewees are identified throughout by occupation and nationality only. Specific titles such as “Chief Justice” have been eliminated.
Data capture modes
Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Notes were taken during all interviews and sometimes observations recorded after the interviews. All interview data are kept anonymous. Subjects are prominent political and legal elites. They are identified by profession and location only.
Court cases were scanned and photocopied. Newspaper articles were summarized and logged in data sheet in Excel.
Logic of activation and annotation
I activate citations that are central to my argument, or are controversial and contestable within the literature.
I annotate the majority of citations drawn from original field data. I explain the data collection techniques and methodological limitations, particularly as it relates to news sources. I also annotate citations which speak directly to major theoretical claims and controversies in the literature. I also attempt to link the annotations to either full text or large portions of the interview, news source, court judgment, secondary literature.
In regards to attaching portions of the interview transcripts, I have redacted large portions of the interview to preserve anonymity. I provide a page or two before the quote and after the quote to elucidate the full context of the quote and allow the reader to further assess its validity and usefulness in supporting my arguments.
In some cases additional data has been collected since the publication of the book. This is referenced and, where possible, is provided.
References to court judgments are linked to full PDF’s of the judgments. Some of these PDF’s are the author’s own copies, others are now available online. Where possible, both the PDF and the URL are provided. This is also the case with news articles. Where web links are not available, extended quotes or portions of the original article are included. </p
Data for: “The politics of polarization: Governance and party system change in Latin America, 1990-2010”
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.
Project Summary
This project develops and tests a new theory to explain left-right polarization in newer democracies, emphasizing the quality of governance and how it shapes incentives for radical parties to moderate. High-quality governance increases the relative salience of left-right programmatic appeals and makes coalitions with status quo parties attractive, creating centripetal incentives for radical parties and empowering moderate factions within those parties. Low-quality governance decreases the relative salience of left-right programmatic appeals and makes coalitions with status quo parties potentially poisonous, creating centrifugal incentives for radical parties and empowering extremist factions. The project employs a nested research design. Case studies of Venezuela and Brazil illustrate the mechanisms of the theory and evaluate its key propositions through process-tracing. These cases were selected because they capture significant variation on the dependent variable, because they are seen as particularly critical for understanding subjects such as the rise of the left in Latin America and the dynamics of programmatic polarization, and because they were the first three countries in the region where the left came to power. In the large-n portion of the research design, statistical analysis is utilized to assess the relationship between governance levels and left-right programmatic polarization across Latin America between 1994 and 2010. This relationship is substantively strong and robust to a variety of different modeling choices.
Data Abstract
The author primarily draws upon two original databases of qualitative materials collected for the project: a collection of roughly 500 “left party-related” sources (party documents, editorials and memoirs of left party leaders, etc.) and a compilation of roughly 900 news sources related to left parties and their factional conflicts. The data were collected from 2008 and 2013 and cover the period from 1985 and 2010. The “left party-related” sources were gathered through archives and libraries. A substantial archive of documents related to the Partido Dos Trabalhadores is housed at the Fundação Perseu Abramo, in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The University of Notre Dame acquired a microfilm copy of this entire archive (93 reels). The author examined the whole archive at Notre Dame, searching for documents and other information that bore directly on the concerns of the project. Because in Venezuela no central archive existed for the left parties involved, the author collated party-related documents and other information from diverse sources, mainly relatively rare books (usually published in Venezuela with small presses) that collected these documents. The database of news articles was generated in the following manner. For each country a newspaper or weekly magazine was selected that was known to provide in-depth political coverage from a relatively centrist perspective: El Universal in Venezuela and Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil. The author then defined the time period for each case during which major factional conflicts within left parties occurred and were resolved: 1993-1998 in Venezuela and 1994-2002 in Brazil. The next step was to collect all stories from each news source in the defined time period that related to left parties, with an emphasis on their factional conflicts and its resolution. The process of doing so differed somewhat according to the medium in which the news source was available. Venezuela’s El Universal was only available on microfilm, requiring the author and a research assistant to review each daily issue, capturing stories to PDF according to defined criteria. Brazil’s Folha’s archives are available online, allowing its database to be searched by sets of key words, downloading the group of stories produced by these searches, and then including the individual stories in the database according to defined criteria. The interviews the author conducted as part of the broader project are not being shared at this time, but might be included in a planned second deposit to QDR of a larger stand-alone data collection.
Files Description
Each case study for which data are being shared contains a two-stage causal argument: (1) governance levels decisively affected factional dynamics within the major left party of that country; (2) the resolution of factional conflict bore strongly on the level of polarization in the emerging party system. For each case, each stage of this argument is supported by several pieces of diagnostic evidence original to the project – both party-related and news sources – that were either scanned (if available only in hard copy) or printed to PDF (if available on microfilm or the Web). The underlying sources will not initially accompany the active citation project (the TRAX will not be hyperlinked to the sources that compose the active citation compilation); the author will provide the sources later.
Logic of Annotation and ActivationAll citations that involve reference to this kind of evidence in these sections of the paper are activated and all the citations chosen for activation are annotated.<p/
Data for: Finding pathways: Mixed-methods research for studying causal mechanisms
No full textThis pedagogical data project provides materials related to conducting pathway analysis: the use of case studies to explore the causal links between variables. Materials include recorded workshop sessions, data sets and problem sets
Presidential campaign advertising in Chile, Brazil, and Peru
No full textProject Summary: These videos of presidential campaign advertising in Chile, Brazil and Peru were collected in order to characterize the evolution of campaign strategies in new democracies. The author conducted a human-coded content analysis of the advertising videos as one data source for scoring three separate dimensions of campaign strategy for each candidate: linkage (direct versus intermediated), policy focus (from high to low), and the presence or absence of cleavage priming. This scoring also drew on three additional data sources: interviews with key political actors, coverage of each campaign in local print media, and, for the 2005-2006 electoral cycle, direct observation of campaign events. These latter data sources were also used to provide insight into why each candidate adopted a particular strategy. The study finds that campaign strategies have diverged across Chile, Brazil, and Peru since democratization. It develops a theory, success contagion, to account for this pattern of evolution. The theory of success contagion claims that the first presidential candidate in each country to combine a victorious electoral strategy with a successful term in office establishes a model that other candidates across the ideological spectrum are likely to employ in the future. In cases like Peru, where victorious campaign strategies are continually delegitimized by the poor governing record of elected presidents, candidates will not converge upon a common approach because they are wary of adopting strategies that voters associate with discredited politicians. Rather, each candidate is likely to choose his or her strategies through an inward-oriented process of reacting to prior errors.
Data Abstract: The author aimed to collect every piece of televised campaign advertising broadcast by a major presidential candidate in Chile, Brazil, and Peru from the 1980s through 2011 (with the exception of Peru’s 1995 and 2000 elections). Major candidates are defined as the first- and second-place finishers, plus any third candidate who received over 20% of the valid vote. All material obtained is shared. Most of the videos being shared were analyzed for the associated research project, but some were not. In Brazil, only the evening electoral broadcasts were analyzed. Most of the evening broadcasts for every major candidate since 1989 are available; in no case are more than 25% of episodes missing, and in most cases, the figure was closer to five percent. For candidates who had broadcast more than four hours of advertising in any one election, a systematic random sample of half of the episodes from that campaign were analyzed (i.e., every other episode with a random start). In other cases, all episodes were analyzed. The 15-, 30-, and 60-second campaign spots aired for free at various times throughout the day in Brazil since 1996 were not collected or analyzed because a) they are often included as segments in the longer broadcasts, and b) they are only available for part of the period under study. In Chile, all broadcasts (daytime and prime time) for major candidates were obtained, except for the first four days of Büchi’s advertising in 1989. All of this material was analyzed, except for the 1988 plebiscite, for which a systematic random sample of half of the episodes was analyzed. In elections without a concurrent legislative race (1999-2000, and the second-round elections in 2006 and 2010), presidential candidates receive free television advertising in both time slots, and they typically repeat programs. In all other elections, however, legislative and presidential candidates alternate daytime and evening slots on successive days, and candidates generally produce different programs for each slot. In Peru, because of the nature of campaign advertising (broadcast at various times throughout the day, and on different channels) it is more difficult to assess the completeness of data collection. For the 2006 and 2011 elections, the collection was checked against data on spots aired in Lima from the tracking firm MediaCheck. For 2006, only a handful of spots aired 2–4 times are missing. For 2011, the collection is spottier but still includes the majority of candidates’ advertisements. For earlier years, there is no independent source of verification, but since most of these spots were obtained by the author directly from the advertising producers themselves, the collection should be fairly comprehensive. All available spots from Peru were analyzed.
Files Description: The data were collected through archival research and compilation of existing material between June 2005 and December 2009, with follow-up research conducted during 2009-2011. Advertising from the 2009-2011 electoral cycle was obtained from the major candidates’ YouTube channels. For the 2005-2006 campaigns, the author recorded it directly from broadcast television. For the earlier years, he obtained copies of videos from a variety of archival sources. In Chile, sources included the Consejo Nacional de Televisión; Televisión Nacional de Chile; Canal 13; the journalism school of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; the Corporación Justicia y Democrácia; the Fundación Frei; the Government of Chile’s Secretaría de Comunicación y Cultura; the Stanford University Bing Overseas Study Program in Santiago; the library of the Universidad Diego Portales; Juan Enrique Forch of Visión Comunicaciones; and the personal collections of Eduardo Bustos, Patricio Dussaillant, and Cristóbal Marín. In Peru, sources included the Communication Department of the Universidad de Lima; the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad; Ricardo Ghibellini of Amazonas Films; Alfonso Maldonado of Cinesetenta; Rubén Bonilla of Corporación Internacional de Comunicaciones; and Abel Aguilar. In Brazil, the author obtained material from the Doxa communication research lab at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ) and from the Fundação Perseu Abramo of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). All videos that were not already in digital form (e.g., they were on a VHS videocassette) were digitized using a laptop and the appropriate playback device.<p/
Data for: “Elite preferences, administrative institutions, and educational development during Peru’s aristocratic republic (1895–1919),” in: State and nation making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the possible
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/elite-preferences-administrative-institutions
Project Summary
This project explores local-level variation in Peruvian education over time. Against prominent scholarship that traces the failure of public goods provision to ethnic diversity and social inequality, the author shows that in Peru schooling (which had languished for the first 80 years after independence) developed precisely during the period at which social and economic inequality was growing most sharply. The author shows how that successful development depended on the centralization of education policy, but even more importantly on the purging of local elites from positions in education administration. He then shows that the gains seen in Peruvian public education (roughly during the period between 1900 and 1920 known as the Civilista Era) faltered thereafter, tracing this to a decision made by state leaders to return local administration to elite hands; this decision was driven by the instability brought on by a wave of revolts between 1915 and 1924 in many heavily indigenous regions. The project thus challenges claims that public good provision and state development in Latin America are socio-economically determined, demonstrating that the design of administrative institutions can empower or disempower local elites resistant to educational development, and that national elites were firmly committed to educational development, and to state-building more generally. Peru’s 1902 Censo Escolar plays several parts in the investigation. Using data at the local level on male school enrollment and literacy, the author assesses in statistical terms the state of sub-national variation in education before the Civilista Era (these consist of simple OLS regressions with various independent variables, and several different indicators of educational development as the dependent variable). The author also uses the quality and degree to which of census data is unevenly missing from this register as an indicator of the spatial reach of state authority. Third, the narrative portion of the Censo, which describes the process of its administration, is used to shed light on state capacity. Drawing on government documents from archives in Peru, the author discusses a series of more preliminary investigations of educational quality in the decade before 1902, showing that these prompted concerns about education and a renewed commitment by the central state to ensuring progress on this front. The author draws on these primary sources as well to explore the broader process of state-building, administrative reform, and educational development in Peru.
Data Abstract
The primary documents used were collected largely in 2004 during dissertation fieldwork in Lima, where the author spent time in various archives and document collections, and in Harvard’s Widener Library. The main type of primary documents used are government documents from 1876-1930, specifically ministerial annual reports, of which the full set available in all the archives were consulted. Secondary source materials, in the form of books and articles by historians and anthropologists, are also used. Most of these studies focus on particular regions of Peru, and provide useful information about local administration, local state development, and the state of education. Thus the full project has three components: 1. Statistical analysis of data from the 1902 educational census; the author transcribed the data from the original document into a Stata-ready format, and ran analyses to explain subnational variation in educational development. 2. Historical description of the organization of the education bureaucracy and shifts over time; this is based on archival research conducted in Peru, which included an examination of all ministerial annual reports for the period in question as well as a review of other available documents from the ministries of education and interior. 3. Explaining the shifts in bureaucratic organization; this is based largely on secondary source texts; the work of historians and anthropologists.
Logic of Annotation and Activation
Since most of the primary source citations are to documents for which the author possesses no scanned copies, the activation will rely more heavily on hand-written notes – typically excerpts copied from the original documents – taken while in the Peruvian archives. One central document (the 1902 educational census) was scanned and a PDF of it will be shared.<p/
Data for: “John F. Kennedy,” in: Leaders at war: How presidents shape military interventions
No full textThis project was originally published as an Active Citation Compilation, a precursor 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/john-f-kennedy
Project Summary
The broader study provides a framework for understanding when and why great powers seek to transform foreign institutions and societies through military interventions. It highlights a crucial but often-overlooked factor in international relations: the role of individual leaders. The book develops and tests a theory that explains how leaders shape both the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy. It argues that leaders’ threat perceptions – specifically, whether they believe that the internal characteristics of other states are the ultimate source of threats – influence how they prepare for and confront intervention choices, especially the degree to which they try to use intervention to remake the domestic institutions of target states. The study concentrates on United States military interventions during the Cold War, allowing the author to focus on the role of leaders by holding constant the structure of the international system as well as domestic institutions. Furthermore, one might expect a particularly strong consensus about the nature of threats during the Cold War, making it a relatively easy case for realist approaches and a harder test for a theory based on causal beliefs. The empirical core of the book concentrates on three US presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The variation in these three presidents’ causal beliefs provides strong analytical leverage in testing the theory. To refute the notion that beliefs are merely justifications for action, and to avoid conflating beliefs and behavior, the author uses archival and historical evidence from the pre-presidential period to show that each president held his beliefs prior to confronting crises and even prior to taking office. After demonstrating the importance of leaders during the Cold War period, the study also explores the theory’s applicability to other historical and contemporary settings, including the post-Cold War period and the war in Iraq.
Data Abstract
The data were collected primarily during two research trips to the Kennedy Library in 2006 and 2008 and cover the Cold War period. The archival evidence itself mainly focuses on the coding of the independent variable, leaders’ beliefs. Since this variable is measured in the pre-presidential period, most of the archival sources used are drawn from pre-presidential collections at the presidential libraries. (The dependent variables – the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy – are measured primarily using published primary sources and secondary sources, since many of the cases have a rich set of published sources and secondary literatures.) The pre-presidential collections, from which the shared sources are primarily derived, differ from the presidential papers in significant ways across the three presidencies, and do not conform to the same standards used to maintain papers in a modern presidency because, of course, the papers were generated and catalogued before it was known that each man would ascend to the presidency. Kennedy’s pre-presidential papers are, however, a very rich source for measuring his foreign policy attitudes and include travel diaries, personal letters, and speech drafts.
Files Description
For most archival-based citations, images for every page of the sources referenced in the citation are available; the few exceptions include items such as diaries, only specific pages of which are copied.
Logic of Annotation and Activation
The goal of this pilot project is to give access to the archival sources cited in the book, subject to permissions. The intention is to allow the reader to view sources that could only be obtained in an archive, to see additional context and make a judgment about whether the inference is appropriate. Since this pilot is focused on archival documents and reducing the transaction costs associated with viewing archival sources, the author has only activated footnotes referring to archival sources and believes that the resources of standard university libraries and the Web provide reasonably ready access to the balance of the materials. One of the motivations for this pilot was to demonstrate the feasibility of using an existing system of organization, which the author employed while conducting the original research, to transfer these images to the QDR for depositing and for activation. The documents were captured using a digital camera and had already been organized in digital format. Because one of the main motivations was to show how scholars could leverage their existing systems to transfer data relatively easily, the author has not retroactively annotated citations. The author has included two types of data that did not appear in the endnotes to the book, however: (1) folder titles for each archival source (cut from the final manuscript for reasons of space); (2) transcriptions of portions of some documents, which the author produced while processing the archival material, winnowing the evidence, and writing up the results. Not every endnote or inference will have transcriptions, however. In many cases the author transcribed documents before making an actual inference, and transcribed more than was ultimately quoted or cited. The transcriptions are retained for the reader’s information (and to make some documents, such as handwritten diary entries, easier to read). Furthermore, one of the additional motivations for the pilot is to demonstrate how the QDR and active citation might work in cases where permissions allow the posting of full documents, so the documents are the focus and the transcriptions are simply “extra” data. Although some sources may not have transcriptions, this says nothing about their value and they will still have images for the underlying data. While the logics of activation and annotation depart somewhat from the current active citation standard, this pilot is intended to demonstrate that a significant degree of transparency can be achieved within the limits of feasibility by leveraging existing practices.</p