Political and legal institutions–rules and organizations–form the infrastructure of governance in countries around the world. What key rules say and omit, and how governing organizations are designed, have significant implications for governance and the governed. States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America (SIGLA) is a new digital resource offering curated, comparable, richly detailed, reliable, and up-to-date data on political and legal institutions in Latin America. In this event, various members of the SIGLA team will describe the contents and organization of the SIGLA database, then illustrate its utility by drawing on its data to analyze and compare change over time in constitutional rights and cross-national variation in specialized court systems in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. These illustrations demonstrate SIGLA’s potential to facilitate comparative institutional analysis and to serve as a platform for understanding the causes and consequences of the institutional arrangements of Latin American countries.
This event will be streamed live to the GAI YouTube channel.
Featuring
Andrés Celis-Madrid (C’26) is a junior at Georgetown University majoring in government. His academic interests focus on the rule of law and democratic resilience in Latin America. He has interned at the International Republican Institute and is an incoming intern with the Americas division of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. On the SIGLA team, he has analyzed institutions of government accountability and the executive, legislative, and judicial systems in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Diana Kapiszewski is associate professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, where she also currently serves as director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research examines law and legal institutions in Latin America and qualitative research methods. She has worked with the SIGLA project since 2017.
Hannah Kurowski (G’25) holds a B.A. in political science from Point Loma Nazarene University and is in her final semester of the Master of Science in Foreign Service program at Georgetown University, concentrating in global politics and security with a regional focus on Latin America. She joined the SIGLA team in the summer of 2024 and analyzes institutions of government accountability in Mexico.