The aim of the Bureaucracy and Development project is to examine the role of local governments and local officials in economic development and public goods provision in a specific administrative jurisdiction (a county, or a township). The student researcher is expected to find a locality (a county, a district) and a specific topic, and conduct fieldwork on how local officials work and coordinate to accomplish a specific task or policy goals. The data collection process may involve interviews (with officials, those affected by the policies or government behaviors), observations of the actual processes, and literature research (in Chinese).

Faculty mentor: Xueguang Zhou, APARC China Program and Department of Sociology
Location: China or remote should travel not be permitted.

Professor Avidit Acharya's team has assembled a rich source of electoral and political representation data for Nepal and has a series of running projects using this data to study the political economy of Nepal. The projects cover a range of topics from Nepal's democratization movements, the state's investments in nationalization, the Maoist insurgency in the 1990's, and ethnic diversity in political representation today. 

They are looking for a research assistant to work with this data. An ideal research assistant will have basic data handling skills (in software such as Python, R, Excel, etc.) and an interest in learning about geographic data and econometrics.

Faculty mentor: Avidit Acharya, Department of Political Science.
Location: Nepal or remote should travel not be permitted.

The research assistant will support Professor Dennis Wall's team that seeks to understand the ability of gamified and crowd-powered systems to aid in the screening and diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Bangladesh through home videos collected via mobile platforms. They will use machine learning algorithms to improve screening and diagnostic methods for children with autism or other developmental disorders, relying on home videos and parental responses to questions,  and medical record information. Crowd raters without prior experience in diagnostics will rate videos using core characteristics of ASD. The study will observe the feasibility and accuracy of this method of screening in the hopes of making care more accessible and providing earlier treatment for patients.

Faculty mentor: Dennis Wall, Stanford University School of Medicine, Pediatrics

How can women’s voices be better represented in existing political institutions? This project seeks to understand whether stronger linkages between female citizens and elected representatives augment the representation of women’s interests. To evaluate the efficacy of stronger citizen-politician linkages for the representation of women’s interests, the study will design and randomize an intervention that would create ties between local elected representatives and Self-Help Groups through a series of discussion meetings around women’s demands.

Over the summer, the research assistant will join the project in its inception phase and help to design and pilot the citizen-linkage intervention. They will additionally help to execute primary data collection to assess the state of women’s ties to political institutions.

Faculty mentor: Soledad Prillaman, Department of Political Science
Cardinal Quarter community partner: PRADAN, an Indian-based NGO