Democracy Interns Announced for Summer 2020!

After a highly selective review, the Political Economy Project is pleased to announce that three undergraduate students--Iris Wang '20, Justin Kramer '21, and Caleb Benjamin '23 (pictured above)--will be serving as paid interns for 10 weeks during the summer of 2020 on a major collaborative research project. The Dartmouth students will work for 10 weeks alongside students from the University of Chicago on at least the following agenda items:  

  1. The Democratic Erosion Event Dataset. This was created in 2018 by a team of master's students from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, then expanded in the summer of 2019 by a team of students from the University of Chicago and Brown University. The database is a collection of data points related to the "precursors and symptoms of, and resistance to, democratic backsliding" around the world. Its contents are drawn from case studies produced by students taking a multi-university course on Democratic Erosion, which is now taught at more than 40 universities. The Dartmouth interns will help expand the dataset by "coding" new case studies for addition to the dataset, as well as improve the methodology for coding, adding or modifying indicators, or other related activities. Along with these tasks, each intern may have the opportunity to gather deep knowledge about one particular area of democratic erosion from the database, in order to write a policy summary
  2. Bright Line Watch. This is a multi-university effort to monitor the state of U.S. democracy. Projects might center on building linkages between Bright Line Watch and the Democratic Erosion consortium, building survey modules to gather views on democracy, or conducting analyses using Bright Line Watch data.

Congratulations to all!