Congratulations to Cecilia Cavero-Sanchez on receiving the Rising Research Award to fund her project titled “Computational Mapping of Alternative Dispute Resolution Institutions.”
This project, co-funded by the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) Rising Researcher Collaborations program, represents a collaboration between Cecilia Cavero-Sanchez as the ICDS-supported junior researcher and Professor Cyanne Loyle as faculty investigator. They will develop a comprehensive global database of Alternative Dispute Resolution Institutions (ADRIs) spanning 1990-2025 by integrating theoretical frameworks from peacebuilding and governance studies with advanced computational methodologies including fine-tuned large language models and named entity recognition. They will design a scalable workflow to systematically extract, classify, and analyze ADRI references across multilingual datasets including V-Dem expert surveys, ACLED, and GDELT with verified expert hand-coding. The main goal is to generate robust country-level presence indicators and country-year political salience measures alongside a theoretically informed typology that will distinguish among various ADRI forms, from traditional elder councils to religious tribunals, and show their interactions with state authority. The project aims to produce a high-quality standardized dataset to facilitate cross-national comparative research and to contribute novel empirical and theoretical insights to the study of alternative governance institutions.
