More Like this

1. Mapping and Modeling Clandestine Drivers of Urban Expansion in Mexico City (2016-2019)

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/5194fc22aaa4e0a5d58cfc6884498aa0  

   Tellman, Elizabeth ( January 2021 , Environmental Data Initiative)

   This dataset incorporates Mexico City related essential data files associated with Beth Tellman's dissertation: Mapping and Modeling Illicit and Clandestine Drivers of Land Use Change: Urban Expansion in Mexico City and Deforestation in Central America. It contains spatio-temporal datasets covering three domains; i) urban expansion from 1992-2015, ii) district and section electoral records for 6 elections from 2000-2015, iii) land titling (regularization) data for informal settlements from 1997-2012 on private and ejido land. The urban expansion data includes 30m resolution urban land cover for 1992 and 2013 (methods published in Goldblatt et al 2018), and a shapefile of digitized urban informal expansion in conservation land from 2000-2015 using the Worldview-2 satellite. The electoral records include shapefiles with the geospatial boundaries of electoral districts and sections for each election, and .csv files of the number of votes per party for mayoral, delegate, and legislature candidates. The private land titling data includes the approximate (in coordinates) location and date of titles given by the city government (DGRT) extracted from public records (Diario Oficial) from 1997-2012. The titling data on ejido land includes a shapefile of georeferenced polygons taken from photos in the CORETT office or ejido land that has been expropriated by the government, and including an accompany .csv from the National Agrarian Registry detailing the date and reason for expropriation from 1987-2007. Further details are provided in the dissertation and subsequent article publication (Tellman et al 2021). The Mexico City portion of these data were generated via a National Science Foundation sponsored project (No. 1657773, DDRI: Mapping and Modeling Clandestine Drivers of Urban Expansion in Mexico City). The project P.I. is Beth Tellman with collaborators at ASU (B.L Turner II and Hallie Eakin). Other collaborators include the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), at the Institute of Geography via Dr. Armando Peralta Higuera, who provided support for two students, Juan Alberto Guerra Moreno and Kimberly Mendez Gomez for validating the Landsat urbanization algorithm. Fidel Serrano-Candela, at the UNAM Laboratory of the National Laboratory for Sustainability Sciences (LANCIS) also provided support for urbanization algorithm development and validation, and Rodrigo Garcia Herrera, who provided support for hosting data at LANCIS (at: http://patung.lancis.ecologia.unam.mx/tellman/). Additional collaborators include Enrique Castelán, who provided support for the informal urbanization data from SEDEMA (Ministry of the Environmental for Mexico City). Electoral, land titling, and land zoning data were digitized with support from Juana Martinez, Natalia Hernandez, Alexia Macario Sanchez, Enrique Ruiz Durazo, in collaboration with Felipe de Alba, at CESOP (Center of Social Studies and Public Opinion, at the Mexican Legislative Assembly). The data include geospatial time series data regarding changes in urban land cover, digitized electoral results, land titling, land zoning, and public housing. Additional funding for this work was provided by NSF under Grant No. 1414052, CNH: The Dynamics of Multiscalar Adaptation in Megacities (PI H. Eakin), and the NSF-CONACYT GROW fellowship NSF No. 026257-001 and CONACYT number 291303 (PI Bojórquez). References: Tellman, B., Eakin, H., Janssen, M.A., Alba, F. De, Ii, B.L.T., 2021. The Role of Institutional Entrepreneurs and Informal Land Transactions in Mexico City’s Urban Expansion. World Dev. 140, 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105374 Goldblatt, R., Stuhlmacher, M.F., Tellman, B., Clinton, N., Hanson, G., Georgescu, M., Wang, C., Serrano-Candela, F., Khandelwal, A.K., Cheng, W.-H., Balling, R.C., 2018. Using Landsat and nighttime lights for supervised pixel-based image classification of urban land cover. Remote Sens. Environ. 205, 253–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.11.026 

   more » « less
2. The Party Personnel Datasets: Advancing Comparative Research in Party Behavior and Legislative Organization Across Electoral Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12365  

   Bergman, Matthew E. ; Struthers, Cory L. ; Shugart, Matthew S. ; Pekkanen, Robert J. ; Krauss, Ellis S. ( December 2021 , Legislative Studies Quarterly)

   This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influence how parties recruit candidates and organize members in legislative and government bodies. In this paper, we first briefly review the relevant literature on electoral nomination and post‐election appointment and then describe our motivations for constructing multi‐country datasets that can be used to further comparative research. To illustrate the possibilities in these new datasets, we show how recruitment and placement of parliamentarians with particular personal characteristics correlates with their placement onto specific committees and cabinet posts. A conclusion identifies other areas of research that might benefit from using the party personnel datasets.

    

   more » « less
3. A qualitative, network-centric method for modeling socio-technical systems, with applications to evaluating interventions on social media platforms to increase social equality

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-022-00486-8  

   Joseph, Kenneth ; Chen, Huei-Yen Winnie ; Ionescu, Stefania ; Du, Yuhao ; Sankhe, Pranav ; Hannak, Aniko ; Rudra, Atri ( July 2022 , Applied Network Science)

   We propose and extend a qualitative, complex systems methodology from cognitive engineering, known as theabstraction hierarchy, to model how potential interventions that could be carried out by social media platforms might impact social equality. Social media platforms have come under considerable ire for their role in perpetuating social inequality. However, there is also significant evidence that platforms can play a role inreducingsocial inequality, e.g. through the promotion of social movements. Platforms’ role in producing or reducing social inequality is, moreover, not static; platforms can and often do take actions targeted at positive change. How can we develop tools to help us determine whether or not a potential platform change might actually work to increase social equality? Here, we present the abstraction hierarchy as a tool to help answer this question. Our primary contributions are two-fold. First, methodologically, we extend existing research on the abstraction hierarchy in cognitive engineering with principles from Network Science. Second, substantively, we illustrate the utility of this approach by using it to assess the potential effectiveness of a set of interventions, proposed in prior work, for how online dating websites can help mitigate social inequality.

    

   more » « less
4. Democracy promotion and electoral quality: A disaggregated analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12526  

   Steele, Carie A. ; Pemstein, Daniel ; Meserve, Stephen A. ( August 2020 , Governance)

   The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments. In theory, aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democratization and democracy promotion literature, we specify more precise causal linkages between democracy assistance and elections. Specifically, we hypothesize about the effects of democracy aid on the implementation and quality of elections. Building on canonical work, we test these hypotheses, using V‐Dem's detailed elections measures to examine the impact of democracy aid. Intriguingly, we find that there is no consistent relationship between democracy and governance aid and the improvement of disaggregated indicators of election quality, but aggregate measures still capture a relationship. We suggest that current evidence is more consistent with election‐enhancing aid following democratization than with democratization following such aid.

    

   more » « less
5. Freedom of the Press and Public Responsiveness

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592719003852  

   Hiaeshutter-Rice, Dan ; Soroka, Stuart ; Wlezien, Christopher ( October 2019 , Perspectives on Politics)

   Public responsiveness to policy is contingent on there being a sufficient amount of clear and accurate information about policy available to citizens. It is of some significance then, that there are increasing concerns about limits being placed on media outlets around the world. We examine the impact of these limits on the public’s ability to respond meaningfully to policy by analyzing cross-national variation in the opinion–policy link. Using new measures on spending preferences from Wave 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, merged with OECD data on government spending and Freedom House measures of press freedom, we assess the role of mass media in facilitating public responsiveness. We find evidence that when media are weak, so too is public responsiveness to policy. These results highlight the critical role that accurate, unfettered media can play in modern representative democracy. 

   more » « less