Doctors as Mayors: Activating Profession in Local Brazil
Alison Post, Professor
Political Science
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
When do voters elect medical doctors for office? Scholars focused on symbolic and substantive representation typically concentrate on race, gender, religion, or some combination thereof. However, historically, political science scholars have been interested in occupation as a salient category, particularly lawyers. With the decline of the politician-lawyer in Congress, scholars lost interest in occupation as an essential social cleavage. Yet, in other countries, there are a substantive number of elected officials who are medical professionals at the local level. Using an online conjoint experiment in Brazil, this project attempts to adjudicate between hypotheses that researchers have used to explain the involvement of other occupations in the political arena, such as prestige, resources, and party affiliation.
Role: Fellows will be expected to assist with designing the conjoint experiment, including, but not limited to,
1) Drafting a literature review examining relevant hypotheses regarding occupation and voter preference;
2) Developing a database that logs occupation and other relevant variables from relevant sources such as TSE and IBGE;
3) Creating descriptive statistics for the number of Brazilian medical professionals, geographic location, and relevant co-variables;
4) Drafting a sample survey, which will be later programmed onto Qualtrics;
5) Other tasks that may emerge.
While knowledge of Portuguese is not necessary, particularly for the preliminary steps, candidates may find it useful to have some knowledge of Portuguese or other Romance languages, especially when looking at preliminary empirical evidence.
Qualifications: Required
-Attention to detail and being thorough, especially when acquiring sources and coding data.
-Basic understanding on how to conduct online searches and ability to manipulate social media features. For example, using filters on Facebook to narrow searches to a particular year. Students should be able to navigate websites like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
-Self-motivated. Students should not be waiting until the last minute to complete tasks.
-Creative. Students should feel empowered to propose new or alternative ways to conduct searches or find new sources of data.
-Have a clear understanding of their limitations and range. Students should not have previously committed to other academic and non-academic activities which can adversely affect their performance on this project.
Desirable but not essential
-Ability to read Spanish or Portuguese, particularly for Tasks 3 and 4.
-Interest in health politics and/or Latin America.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Adan Steve Martinez, Ph.D. candidate
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Social Sciences Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & Technologies