Abstract
This introductory chapter presents the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA-USAL) project, which has conducted interviews with Latin American legislators in the lower chambers of political representation for more than 20 years. The following emphasizes the PELA-USAL project’s methodology, as well as its most important inputs and future challenges. Based on the experience of researchers from the project, our aim here is to re-think several issues (such as data mining) that arise during the research process, taking into account the wealth of available information (after two decades of development) and the particularities that parliamentary elites present as an object of study. First we consider the main issues inherent in the study of elites from a theoretical-methodological perspective. Second, the principles treated in the first section are related directly to the PELA-USAL project. Finally, discussion of the main challenges and future agenda for the project is provided. All of this is supported by the specialized bibliography, as well as by data from the project itself.
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Notes
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Politicians can be analyzed in two ways: as actors who explain political phenomena, or as actors who can be explained in and of themselves. On the one hand, political problems can be understood by way of the actions of politicians within the system. On the other hand, politicians themselves can be explained by their own processes of professionalization (Alcántara 2006).
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The PELA Project has always had public funding. Over its more than 20 years of activity, the following projects have been financed: SEC94/0284, SEC95/0845, SEC02/3484, SEJ 2005-08313, C/POL, CSO 2009-08971, and CSO2012-39377-C02-02.
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Examples of added questions: “In terms of your career, what would you like your next office to be?” or “From the following characteristics here presented (education, political expertise, honesty, charisma, or political leadership), which do you think is most important to winning an election? And to win second place?”
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A good example here would be the question related to the advantages and disadvantages of a democratic regime: “I am going to show you a list of possible advantages of democratic regimes, and I would like to know which, in your opinion, would represent the main advantage. And the second?” At the beginning of the research, in 1994, these questions responded to the interest in democratic consolidation following transitions, and to the level of institutionalization of the state when facing possible threats. However, more than two decades later, challenges have evolved beyond the consolidation of democracy.
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At present, a new axis of analysis has been incorporated: that of gender, with the objective of analyzing the characteristics of women legislators in Latin America as well as their attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions on different dimensions of the political system, comparing these with those of their male counterparts.
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For further information, see: https://oir.org.es/pela/publicaciones/
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Barragán, M., Rivas Pérez, C., Rivas Otero, J.M. (2020). PELA-USAL: A Methodological Tool for the Study of Elites. In: Alcántara, M., García Montero, M., Rivas Pérez, C. (eds) Politics and Political Elites in Latin America. Latin American Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51584-3_1
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