Latin American Elites in front of the Global Power Shift: Preferences of Legislators toward the changing roles of the U.S. and China

Develop a long-term research project on the role of legislators in Latin American foreign policy-making, with the expectation of being able to apply for external funding, in order to cover further steps of it.
Contribute to the foreign policy analysis field, by exploring the preferences and attitudes of Latin American legislators. This field has devoted little attention to the role played by actors other than the president.
Contribute to the legislative politics field, by extending the analysis of distributive models to a major policy dimension, across multiple Latin American democracies, by developing a framework connecting the preferences and interests of voters to the perceptions of elected officials.

First, we expect to present preliminary findings at political science meetings —such as the American Political Science Association and/or the International Studies Association- by 2019, where we can discuss our conclusions with colleagues, see their reactions, and learn about the possible existence of similar projects taking place in parallel to ours.
Second, we expect to publish at least one article with our findings, in a peer-reviewed political science journal. We believe, based on our revision of the literature, that our expected results will make a substantive contribution to the field. Since our contribution will be novel to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking audiences as well, we foresee publications in these languages as well.
Third, once the data collection is over and once the results are published in peer-reviewed journals, we will make the dataset available, following the rules of the journal/s as well as the restrictions of our data sources on data releases. The data collected might serve a variety of other research objectives and thus will have value in its own right.

Finally, we will train the project’s two research assistants as young social science researchers, teaching them data collection and data analysis techniques. We believe that we can contribute to the
university’s research community by developing human resources that may participate in other projects, and to the professional development of students that will be better prepared to later on pursue graduate studies.