Recovering Brazil's democratic history: a USP-MIT data collection initiative

• Grant number: 13/50760-1
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: January 01, 2014
• End date: June 30, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Agreement: MIT
• Principal Investigator: Fernando de Magalhães Papaterra Limongi
• Grantee: Fernando de Magalhães Papaterra Limongi
• Principal researcher abroad: Fernando Daniel Hidalgo
• Institution abroad: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 11/08536-1 - Political institutions, executive-legislative relationship and government performance, AP.TEM

Abstract

We propose a MIT-USP collaboration to recover 45 years of Brazilian electoral data from government archives for the use for social scientists and historians. The availability of this disaggregated, local-levei, municipal data for the entire country will allow social scientists to address important and thus far unanswered questions about the transformation of Brazilian politics over the last 60 years. With this data, we could begin to identify the causes and timing of the introduction of robust competition at the local levei, as well as study historical continuities between the pre-1964 period and the post-democratization period. The data collection effort would involve sending students to archives in Brasilia and the state capitais and developing a methodology for digitizing and harmonizing the data. Seed funding would be used to host two workshop - one at MIT and one at USP - well as finance archival research trips. Data ultimately would be made freely available to scholars. (AU)