SIGLA, a Georgetown-affiliated Database on Latin American Political and Legal Institutions, Officially Launches

The website logo for the beta version of SIGLA, the version which includes information on institutions of governance in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, in addition to a multitude of Latin America-based international institutions (logo design: Katherine Gregory COL ‘21, SIGLA).

States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America (SIGLA), a Georgetown-affiliated online multilingual database, officially launched on April 4. SIGLA provides users with information on legal and political institutions, as well as international institutions, in Latin America. As part of SIGLA’s mission to democratize information on governance in Latin America, all users can access the database for free. The initiative has been led by Dr. Diana Kapiszewski (MA Latin American Studies ‘94), an associate professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Government, and a research team primarily composed of undergraduate students, with contributions from masters and doctoral students at both the research and administrative levels.

Filling Gaps: How the idea for SIGLA came about and what SIGLA seeks to address

Prior to SIGLA, Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) created the Political Database of the Americas (PDBA) in the 1990s, with support from the Organization of American States (OAS). According to Dr. Kapiszewski, the idea for the PDBA came forth when former Georgetown professor Arturo Valenzuela, the director of CLAS at the time, was working in tandem with the OAS on issues of political stability in Haiti. “It started as a comparative constitutions project,” said Dr. Kapiszewski, who worked on the PDBA while pursuing a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies at Georgetown in the early 1990s. Over time, the PDBA expanded, covering other types of political institutions in Latin America, but was decommissioned in the early 2010s due to a loss of funding. “I knew one of the things I wanted to do was rebuild the PDBA,” said Dr. Kapiszewski when describing her return to Georgetown as a professor in 2013. Prior to developing a successor database to the PDBA, Dr. Kapiszewski and her team searched online to see whether another database had continued the work of the PDBA, but according to Dr. Kapiszewski, “there actually wasn’t one; the PDBA really had left a gap.”

Like the PDBA, SIGLA will include information on political institutions. However, because one of SIGLA’s main foci is to provide data that will highlight the quality of democracy in Latin America, it will expand on what the PDBA offered by including information on legal institutions as well. “At the moment the PDBA was created, the concern in Latin America was democratic backsliding. Are these countries going to remain democracies? The PDBA is all about democratic institutions,” said Dr. Kapizewski. “In the ensuing 30 years, it became obvious that the question in Latin America was not only democratic backsliding, the stability of democracy, but also the quality of democracy. A lot of what influences the quality of democracy is the rule of law and legal institutions.”

Although SIGLA will expand with regard to the types of institutions it will include, it maintains a more narrow focus on Latin America. The PDBA contained information on the 33 countries that constitute “the Americas,” including all of continental Latin America and the Caribbean. SIGLA, however, will only include information on 20 countries, including continental Latin American countries with Iberian tradition as well as the following island states: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

Initial Steps: Why Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia for the beta version

In 2017, according to Dr. Kapiszewski, the SIGLA team began collecting data on the constitutions of all countries of interest; however, upon realizing how long data collection for all countries would take, the team decided to narrow their data collection to Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. According to Felipe Lobo Koerich (BSFS ‘21, LAS ‘22), a research associate and the social media manager for SIGLA, the SIGLA team decided to focus on these countries to reflect the region’s diversity and to attract donors. “You have Brazil representing the Southern Cone… you have Colombia representing Northern South America [and the Caribbean] region of South America, and Mexico representing Central America and Northern Central America. On top of that, we wanted to focus on the largest countries in the region… as typically, those tend to get the most attention,” explained Lobo Koerich. 

Weathering COVID-19: How SIGLA flourished in the midst of a pandemic

When discussing the impact of the COVID-19 on the progress of SIGLA’s launch, Dr, Kapiszewski explained that, “[the COVID-19 pandemic] didn’t really make it harder at all… because [the SIGLA team] had already been working together since January [2020]; we had a couple of months of working together and it made a big difference.”

During the summer and fall of 2020, the SIGLA team focused on developing the website, which has been live since November 2020. “Everything you see on that website was a decision of this poor, scattered team during the pandemic! We kind of came together as a community. [SIGLA] held us together, it was something we looked forward to,” Dr. Kapiszewski continued.

Sarah Bryant (BSFS ‘22), a research associate and member of SIGLA’s leadership team, described her SIGLA onboarding, which took place during summer of 2020; “we were meeting very frequently, we were actually meeting twice a week that summer because we were trying to build our database on the tech side in addition to doing all the data collection.” Bryant continued, “since we were all in quarantine, it became a real source of community to have those consistent meetings and to be in an environment with people who [had] very similar interests to me and who were very passionate about the project.”

At a logistical level, although the team initially faced some difficulties transitioning to a virtual environment, Lobo Koerich explained that the forced transition allowed SIGLA to be more inclusive in the long run. “We figured out a system that works really well. Now we have a great backup for when people are abroad or when people can’t make it.”

Addressing Challenges: Ensuring SIGLA’s legitimacy in the lead up to the launch

For the beta version, SIGLA has contemporary data on the subset of institutions it includes (see below); in other words, the data on SIGLA’s website reflects the present day. However, a challenge the team faced in the lead up to the launch was ensuring that the data that SIGLA researchers collected between 2017 and 2020 was still relevant. In order to ensure that the data corresponding to each institution included in the beta version was accurate, the SIGLA team updated and verified data for all institutions in each of the three countries prior to the April 4 launch. When explaining the importance of systematic verification of the data, Dr. Kapiszewski emphasized, “[SIGLA is] a database, [if] we start serving bad data, that’s the end. No one pays any attention to us anymore.”

Bryant also said the SIGLA team has been working on internal documentation to consolidate information on SIGLA’s methodology and create the database’s technical codebook. Bryant recognized that “even though that’s the kind of [information] that may not get looked at a ton by the average user, I think it’s so important. We wanted to make sure that we have strong credibility from the start and [show] not only that we have the data but also how we’ve collected it and why we’ve done our processes in certain ways.”

According to Alexis Gorfine (BSFS ‘22), a researcher on the Brazil team, finding the information itself can be challenging. “One of the things SIGLA does is it provides access to information that is otherwise really hard to find. I think sometimes it can be really frustrating; especially with SIGLA, we want to be so thorough and we want to make sure everything we’re putting out there is really accurate. In addition to sometimes having a hard time finding the information, you want to make sure that you’re really reading through it very carefully. You know, Portuguese is not by any means my first language… The biggest challenge, or frustration, is just trying to make sure [we are] in the right place or [we are] finding the information and that [we are] reading it correctly.”

Diving In: How the database works and who it’s for

As of now, SIGLA users can access data, primarily in English, on the following national-level institutional categories in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil: Codes, the Constitution, Elections, the Legislature, and the Executive. SIGLA also provides data on 25 international institutions, all of which have at least a plurality of members from Latin American countries. Users can choose to access data in four ways: browsing by country, browsing by institution, using a custom browse setting, or comparing two or more countries. The website contains a detailed user guide that users can reference when accessing the database.

Once a user selects a browsing setting and indicates their countries of interest, institutional categories of interest, and specific institutions of interest, the database provides the user with variables within the institution and data that corresponds to the variables (see image). SIGLA provides users with data for each variable in three ways, displayed in separate columns: by providing the answer (labeled “SIGLA’s Answer”), by quoting the original text (labeled “Original Text”), and by linking and citing the source itself (labeled “Source”).

This is an example of browsing by country, Mexico, to find data about a specific institution, the executive branch. Each variable is located in the left-most column and the database provides users with data on the executive branch at three levels: SIGLA’s Answer, Original Text, and Source (SIGLA).

According to Lobo Koerich, providing data in three ways makes the data accessible to a wide range of users. “You have a column with SIGLA’s answer, so that’s where we summarize and provide a more layman’s term response to that variable. Our hope is to make that [element of data] as accessible across the board as we can. The second column is then us quoting directly from the sources we’re looking at… the hope is for that [element of data] to appeal more to slightly more expert audiences who are more versed in the issue and really want to look at the text itself, not necessarily the summary we provide of it. The third and final column is just a link and a detailed citation of those sources that we quote, and that one, I imagine, would be most applicable to academics; that’s for a more well-versed audience.”

When asked about the audience the SIGLA team plans to reach, Dr. Kapiszewski said, “we really hope the audience is multifaceted. We hope that scholars like us are interested in the database and the comparison it facilitates. We think potentially business people who are thinking about investing in one of these countries might be interested in all of these laws and all of this information that we have about the various political and legal institutions… We think that government leaders and policymakers in all of the countries of Latin America could certainly be interested in the information we have on them, as well as all of the information we have on other countries. And then people in the civil society organizations and NGOs we think will definitely find interesting information on SIGLA. So we’re really hoping that it is useful to lots of different kinds of constituencies.”

Both Bryant and Gorfine also hope SIGLA proves useful to students. Bryant elaborated, “within Georgetown, I really hope that it is a useful tool for students… it can be really hard to find legitimate sources when you’re trying to find something really specific.”

Future Prospects: How the SIGLA team hopes to expand upon the beta version

Over time, SIGLA plans to expand in three major facets. First, SIGLA plans to consolidate more data by expanding to include all 20 countries in SIGLA’s definition of Latin America, as well as 51 total institutions. According to Lobo Koerich, the SIGLA team first plans to collect data on more institutions in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. As of now, all of the institutions on SIGLA’s website are national-level institutions; in addition to adding more national-level institutions, Dr. Kapiszewski hopes to eventually include data on institutions at the state and municipality levels as well. Second, according to Elizabeth Ash (BSFS ‘21), a current project manager, the SIGLA team also plans to include historical data, starting at the point during which Latin American governments began transitioning into democracies. Third, the team plans to provide information in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as English. 

In order to meet these demands, Ash said, “we hope to expand the team of RAs [research assistants] at some point and we also hope to get grant money to build technical resources that can help us monitor websites and see when things have changed. Even if we had an infinitely large team, it would be really, really hard to check everything and keep everything up to date without technical help.”

With regard to expanding to the state and municipality levels, Dr. Kapiszewski hopes to develop institutional partnerships with at least one university in each Latin American country. “We know that when we go to states and municipalities, we’re not just going to be able to find that [information] on the internet… particularly historical data,” said Dr. Kapiszewski. She continued, “we’re going to need to have institutional partners in Latin America where we can get RAs on the ground collecting data at the municipal level for us… and helping us to understand it.”