New LAPIS social network site

As blog/web coordinator for LAPIS, I've recently set up a Ning community for LAPIS. If you would like to join, please email me at mcentellas@gmail.com and I'll add you as soon as I can (I'll be traveling over the summer).

So far, we (Anibal Perez-Liñan and I) are just starting to set up the Ning site. For those of you unfamiliar with Ning, it is a social network site that can be tailored to specific groups and/or organizations. If you're familiar with Facebook, it's like that. Except that it is limited in membership to only those people who are invited by administrators (so far that is Anibal and myself, though we can expand that to the rest of the LAPIS executive community and a few others later). So this is meant to be a "professional" social network.

My idea for it is to stand as a place where those of us who study Latin American politics (and particularly political institutions) can keep in contact ("network"), share ideas (any member can start a discussion forum), post links to important resources and/or news relevant to our scholarly community (e.g. new data sources, calls for papers, interesting conferences, etc.). Hopefully, it will be updated more frequently than the LAPIS blog (my apologies for having dropped the ball on that this past semester), but not so frequently that it becomes a burden. More than anything else, it should be an interactive forum for LAPIS news (like a section newsletter).

To take a look at the site as it currently stands, here is the link:

http://latinamericanpolitics.ning.com

Please let me know what you think. I'll be traveling this summer (doing research in Bolivia), but will try to keep up with my email as best I can.

Election Data Request (from CLEA)

David Backer (William & Mary College) is looking for district-level election data for Latin America. I'm going to provide him with data for Bolivia (1985-2005), but he is looking for data from other countries. This is part of a larger project he is working on with Ken Kollman and Allen Hicken (University of Michigan) and Daniele Caramani (University of St. Gallen). The data will be made publicly available as part of the Constituency-Level Election Archive (CLEA) online at: http://www.electiondataarchive.org.

The specific countries/years they are looking for are:

Argentina: pre-1983
Bolivia: pre-2005
Belize: pre-1979
Brazil: pre-1945 and 1966-1978
Chile: pre-1941
Colombia: 1931-1998
Costa Rica: pre-1953
Ecuador: pre-2002 except for 1979, 1984 and 1988
El Salvador: pre-2000
Guatemala: pre-2003
Guyana: pre-1997
Honduras: pre-1980 + 1989
Mexico: pre-1998
Nicaragua: pre-2001
Panama: pre-1999
Paraguay: pre-2003
Peru: pre-2001 except for 1995
Venezuela: pre-1998 except for 1968-1983

Additionally, they are also looking for data from the following Caribbean countries:

Anguilla: pre-2000
Antigua & Barbuda: pre-1971
Aruba: all but 1994-1997
Bahamas: pre-2002
Barbados: pre-1966
Bermuda: pre-1989
British Virgin Islands: pre-2003
Cayman Islands: pre-1984
Domincan Republic: pre-1962
Dominica: pre-1995
French Polynesia: all
Grenada: pre-1976
Guadeloupe: all
Haiti: pre-2000
Martinique: all
Mayotte: all
Montserrat: all
Netherlands Antilles: all
New Caledonia: all
St. Barthelemy: all
St. Helena: all
St. Kitts & Nevis: pre-1995
St. Lucia: 1987 (x 2)
St. Martin: all
St. Pierre & Miquelon: all
St. Vincent & Grenadine: pre-2001 except for 1957
Trinidad and Tobago: pre-1995

If you are insterested, you may contact David Backer directly at: daback@wm.edu