Category: Newsletters

we are excited to announce the 2019 TCPD summer Internship. The deadline for the application is May 1 2019.

Project Updates: SURF is a data cleaning tool that the Trivedi Center built to map out trajectories of politicians – how they contest, and when they win. The challenge in analyzing this is that there are variations in the names of contestants across elections – for example, Mr. L.K. Advani has run under several different variations of the spellings (Lal Krishna Advani, Advani Lalkrushna, etc). This problem is overcome by implementing a name matching algorithm that is customized to the task of matching Indian names.

TCPD is partnering with the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). This partnership emerged from the Empirical and Computational Social Sciences in India (ECSSI) conference that TCPD organized in December 2018. We have received a funding commitment of $7900 from PRIO to work on building an event dataset using national and local newspaper archives. This is a part of the Costs of Contention project led by Christian Davenport (University of Michigan) and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård (PRIO).

The third issue of the TCPD Newsletter covers TCPD’s initiatives of shedding some light on the Vidhan Sabha elections results which were announced on December 11. Team members engaged in fieldwork, wrote media pieces and organized a public discussion to share their insights. TCPD also hosted two conferences – a Conference on Empirical and Computational Social Sciences in India (ECSSI) between December 13-15 and a Conference on Democratic Politics in India (LIA SPINPER) on December 21.

This is the second issue of the TCPD Newsletter. Our current issue contains experiences of three students who spent time in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan collecting information about the profile of candidates selected by political parties to contest elections. We are also excited to announce the following – a collaboration with two scholars on an on-going project on studying the determinants of political ambition amongst both women and men, an award to one of our team members for her research, a partnership with an organization to co-host public lectures of political intermediaries, two conferences that the Centre is organizing in December and lastly the addition of a new team member.

Welcome to our first issue of the TCPD Newsletter, our monthly newsletter. The purpose of this newsletter is to highlight new projects, updates to existing projects, on-going research, publications, participation in conferences, opportunities to work with us and events. All of our TCPD Newsletter issues will also be available online on our website. Our current issue includes a data release and an addition to our working paper series which uses the data, the addition of two new features to Lok Dhaba, an opportunity to work with us and the addition of a web developer to our team.