Pilot Projects


As part of QDR’s initial development, the repository commissioned 21 pilot projects of various types. The scholars who produced these pilots hailed from all ranks and subfields of the discipline and worked at institutions across the United States. While all the pilot projects were based on rigorous empirical work, their content was as varied as the scholars who produced them.

The pilot projects were vital in advancing two of QDR’s critical goals. The lack of a qualitative data sharing tradition in the United States meant that scholars at large were unsure what procedures and products were implied by evolving norms of data sharing and research transparency. The pilots provided some initial lessons on what sharing qualitative data entails, what types of data can be shared, and in what formats.

Further, the pilots illustrated how sharing qualitative data – with careful attention to human subjects and copyright concerns that may attend those data – can facilitate secondary analysis, allow qualitative scholarship to be more easily understood and evaluated, and enhance teaching.

The table below notes what type of project each pilot is – a data collection (DC), topic cluster (TC), active citation compilation (ACC), or pedagogical data collection (PDC) – and offers some basic information for each. Clicking on the “Title of Project” takes users to a brief description summarizing the research underlying the pilot project (where applicable) and describing the data and their availability.  For pilot projects that are complete, the project description includes a link to the project. 

Type

Depositor

Title

PDC Jeb Barnes and Nicholas Weller Finding Pathways: Mixed Methods Research for Studying Causal Mechanisms

DC

Taylor Boas

Presidential Campaign Advertising in Chile, Brazil, and Peru

DC

Tomás Bril and Alison Post

Consumer Subsidies in Post-Crisis Argentina

ACC

Timothy Crawford

Pivotal Deterrence and the Chain Gang: Sir Edward Grey’s Ambiguous Policy and the July Crisis, 1914 (Chapter 4 in Pivotal Deterrence:  Third Party-Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace)

DC

Thad Dunning and Edwin Camp

Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics

DC

Zachary Elkins

Constitute: Constitutional Text for Scholars and Drafters

ACC

Rachel Ellett

Democratic and Judicial Stagnation (Chapter 6 in Pathways to Judicial Power in Transitional States: Perspectives from African Courts)

DC

Tanisha Fazal

Interstate War Initiation and Termination (I-WIT) data set

ACC

Samuel Handlin

The Politics of Polarization: Governance and Party System Change in Latin America, 1990-2010

ACC

Veronica Herrera

Does Commercialization Undermine the Benefits of Decentralization for Local Services Provision? Evidence from Mexico’s Urban Water and Sanitation Sector (World Development)

DC

Diana Kapiszewski

The Argentine Supreme Court in Press, 1995-1999

DC

Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Political Actors, 1944-2010

ACC

Benjamin Read

Power Relations at the Alley Level  (Chapter 4 in Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei)

ACC

Jessica Rich

Grassroots Bureaucracy: Intergovernmental Relations and Popular Mobilization in Brazil’s AIDS Policy Sector (Latin American Politics and Society)

TC

Sally Roever

Negotiating Formality: Informal Sector, Market, and State in Peru

ACC

Elizabeth Saunders

John F. Kennedy (Chapter 4 in Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions

TC

Aaron Schneider

New Orleans Satellite Government

DC

Druscilla Scribner

Constitutionalizing Gender: Implications for Policy in Argentina and Chile

ACC

Jack Snyder

Russia: The Politics and Psychology of Overcommitment (Chapter 7 in The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914)

ACC

Hillel Soifer

Elite Preferences, Administrative Institutions, and Educational Development during Peru’s Aristocratic Republic (1895-1919) (In Centeno and Ferraro, eds., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain)

ACC Lisa Wedeen

Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria.