Politics Through Time is a research program that aims to create a scholarly hub for those interested in studying the historical development of the institutions of political accountability by using recent advances in information technology and data-science.
Politics Through Time is a research program that explores how contemporary democracies themselves democratized. Just as data science has transformed a range of fields across the natural and social sciences, the study of the political history of democracy and authoritarianism provides the opportunity to leverage new forms of data and new techniques of data analysis in order to generate theoretical and applied lessons.
Working in part with the collaboration of other centers at Harvard (including the Institute of Quantitative Social Science, the Center for Geographic Analysis, and the Center for European Studies), the program depends on the joint effort of faculty, trained graduate students, and undergraduate junior "apprentices" to assemble this body of data and make it publicly available online. Politics Through Time also makes it work accessible to the academic community through numerous interdisciplinary workshops and conferences.
Scholars involved in Politics Through Time find themselves at the edge of a research frontier where technological innovations offer immense and unprecedented opportunities for new scholarly progress.