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RESEARCH PRODUCT

PELA-USAL: A Methodological Tool for the Study of Elites

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This introductory chapter presents the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA-USAL) project, which has conducted interviews with Latin American legislators in the lower chambers of political representation for more than 20 years. The following emphasizes the PELA-USAL project’s methodology, as well as its most important inputs and future challenges. Based on the experience of researchers from the project, our aim here is to re-think several issues (such as data mining) that arise during the research process, taking into account the wealth of available information (after two decades of development) and the particularities that parliamentary elites present as an object of study. First we consider the main issues inherent in the study of elites from a theoretical-methodological perspective. Second, the principles treated in the first section are related directly to the PELA-USAL project. Finally, discussion of the main challenges and future agenda for the project is provided. All of this is supported by the specialized bibliography, as well as by data from the project itself.