(Updated Summer 2019)
Since my CV does not do justice to the paths I took in my academic career, I thought it was a good idea to write down my ‘story’. I am sharing it not because it is an atypical one (it’s likely not) but because in so many ways and so unexpectedly it has prepared me for academic life. Many of the decisions I made seemed random at times, and many accidental events took my professional life in major new (and largely unplanned) directions. The skills that I acquired in the process made me the researcher that I am today.
The story is written tongue-in-cheek-ishly at times. Thanks for reading.
Early years
When I was growing up in Bulgaria during the 1970s and 1980s, becoming a college professor did not feature in any conversations I had as a kid. There were college professors in the country, of course, but how one became such was never discussed in my family or schooling. The field of Political Science didn't even exist. The closest area taught in the universities at that time would have been Theory of Marxism, or perhaps History/Sociology. What to become when I grew up took a very different form.
Despite being a daughter of two engineers, early on it was determined that I was not good at math. Relatively speaking (esp. for a Bulgarian), I am not good at math. I was not that great at writing or literary studies either. But I was fairly good at memorizing facts, and I was curious about the natural world, so I gravitated towards biology and chemistry. So, I was going to be a medical doctor. In middle school, I started preparing for entrance exams of the local high school specializing in natural sciences and math. I did not consider the slightly more prestigious language-focused high school due to my lower aptitude (although not necessarily grades) in literary studies.
Entrance exams were in the subject of choice, in my case biology as a first preference, and chemistry as a back up. To prepare for the exams, my friends and I took private lessons with a local teacher. Those consisted of memorizing the material the teacher gave us, and going to her house before school started (6:00-7:00am) to recite what we had learned the day before. It paid off and I got the maximum on the entrance exam earning a spot on the biology track, the second most competitive track after math. The exam for chemistry was super easy for me but chemistry was not as prestigious so I enrolled in biology. This track was (loosely) the equivalent of a pre-med major.
My cohort in high school was part of an experimental program where the first year we undertook an intensive study of a foreign language (English for most, with one class in French), in addition to the selected track. I had started studying English in second grade after my mother learned that a cousin had been signed up for language lessons. Studying English as an extracurricular activity at that time (early 80s) consisted of listening to tapes of lessons produced by the British Council, and repeating what we heard. We also did a lot of copying by hand, and memorizing words and grammar rules. On tests (and there were many), each spelling mistake led to a .25 point deduction, grammar mistakes – .5 point. On a grading scale from two to six, four spelling mistakes would bring down your grade by a full unit. None of my teachers before high school were trained in the communicative method of language learning, so it was good I was so great at memorization.
I started high school with over ten years of English learning. Our first year, grade 8th, we took two subjects - Biology and English, each for about three periods a day, every day. We likely also had gym class but I was so terrible at it too, I must have blocked this off. After the first year, other subjects were added: History, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, Literature. My first year of high school coincided with the end of the communist regime. For us that meant that the instruction of English became more fun, on Fridays, we listened to and learned Western pop and rock songs. Pink Floyd’s The Wall was a popular one, as were all the Beatles songs. The opening of the wall also meant that we got a Peace Corp volunteer to assist with English language instruction, opening the doors to learning methodologies such as conversation! He also organized a class trip to the newly opened American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), and a handful of us went on the trip.
In the meantime, I was still going to be a medical doctor. Anesthesiologist to be precise, and my good friend at that time – a surgeon. Preparing for entrance exams at medical schools is no joke, each school conducts its own testing; there are no standardized exams, only a vague notion (and leaked questions) of what might be asked. A handful of teachers in our town had a solid reputation of successfully preparing high school students for those exams, and we had one of them as our Biology teacher. Our studying took the following form: in class, the teacher would dictate to us supplements to the assigned textbook, telling us where to add what text, what to delete perhaps. We took notes, then memorized the text and the additions, and were asked to recite it in class for a grade. For the non-major track subjects, such as Physics, we just memorized what was in the textbooks.
Thanks to the new possibilities, my friend (the future surgeon) and I were also going to study medicine in the US. We (she mostly) somehow convinced the high school principal to allow us to skip our fifth year to be able to prepare for the SAT exam. This required us to take two years of courses in one, and being examined on the material in front of the class. We didn’t graduate early but having shown good memorization of the subjects, we were allowed to not attend most of high school in the last year. We studied for the SAT and applied to colleges in the US. I was rather selective in my applications, didn’t score enough to be offered financial aid, and chose my back-up school, the American University in Bulgaria. My friend started at the University of Mississippi, and is now a Hopkins-educated, Harvard-trained cardio-thoracic surgeon, tenured at U Mass.
College and graduate school
I found myself having to figure out what to study at AUBG, after all these years of memorizing biology textbooks. In 1993, International Relations seemed most appealing so that’s what I majored in. Even though I took classes that I would later consider comparative politics, they were not exactly called that, and frankly I hardly knew the field existed. But I gained some research experience, and got determined to study in the US, at least for my masters. Except that very few schools in the US offer financial aid for international students pursuing a terminal masters degree. So I accepted an offer for a fellowship in the PhD program at Florida State University (FSU). I had very little appreciation of the differences in research methodologies in our discipline but it turned out that I was not that bad in math, and I managed fairly well in the program.
At FSU I learned that there is a field of comparative politics, and was drawn to it, rather than to the conflict studies that dominated the IR subfield in the department at that time. Having just arrived in the US for the first time abroad, with one suitcase, and not knowing anyone in the country other than my surgeon friend (then a student at Northeastern University), I had to figure out a research path for myself. I left Bulgaria in 1997, after years of failed reforms and in the midst of hyperinflation, and understanding the politics of economic reform was most interesting to me. Initially, I toyed with the idea of working on a topic similar to the Manifesto Project, of which I first heard in college when Prof. Hans Dieter Klingemann gave a talk to my junior class. While I found the subject of mandate democracy as applied to the post-communist world to be an immensely interesting research conundrum, at that point in my studies, I was not sure how I’d contribute to this stream of research. My PhD advisor, HeeMin Kim (who had done work related to the Manifesto Project), and I had a conversation of whether I could possibly find a niche to work on the subject, or I could go in a direction of research that is less explored. The did the latter, and years later I returned to my original passion of studying party positions, and was able to find ways to contribute to this research area.
My dissertation dealt with the seemingly (at that time) incompatible nature of the dual political and economic transitions undertaken by many post-communist countries. Looking beyond the more general definitions of ‘market’ and ‘democracy’, I asked what types of democratic institutions support what types of market reforms. To assess this question, I needed data that was not available at the time, and that went beyond the IMF ratings and EBRD reform scores. In particular, what specific decisions about individual economic reform components did each government take, and when? First, I had to determine what are the reform components, e.g. prices of what products were liberalized; what legal aspects were changed to introduce elements of the market; what was to be privatized. I compiled a list of products, goods, services, laws that needed changing. Then, I found a way to trace (thank you wire AP services and Lexis-Nexis) what government action was taken when, for 19 countries between 1989 and 2000. The data reflected if the government planned to take action in each specific area, deliberated it, or approved it. Similarly, did it take any of these steps to reverse progress with marketization? Then, I needed to account for types of governments, other institutions, and other explanations of government actions. In short, I found that socially painful reforms that have the potential to hurt specific groups of ‘losers’ are facilitated by institutional factors that restrict decision-making. On the other hand, reform policies that can benefit broader segments of society are successful when more decision-makers are included. Later on, I expanded the study to include specific cases of governments in each category, across ten democracies. I was not successful in placing this research as a publication but I still think it was a neat project. The skills I learned (coding and dataset building), and the broader questions I asked – how institutions shape government decisions, and how different visions of representation affect policies - came in handy in my subsequent research.
I spent the last year of my PhD program away from campus, writing, and upon graduation found myself living in a new city where I hardly knew anyone, and without a job. My first adjunct position was for my former department, and required me to commute 2.5h each way twice a week. It was hardly possible to rent another apartment, although I did crash in with friends a few times. We had one unreliable car, so I had to rent a vehicle each week to go teach; most of my paycheck went into car rentals but I did get more independent teaching experience, and the following semester I was hired to adjunct for the Dept of Political Science at the University of Florida, in Gainesville where we lived. Towards the end of the semester, I was chatting with a faculty member who was organizing a regional conference, and he mentioned in passing that a colleague of his had some grant money and was looking to hire someone to help with a project.
I then walked into Amie Kreppel’s office to ask about this opportunity, and she pretty much on the spot hired me as the Internship Coordinator of the newly established Center for European Studies. I worked at the Center for eight years in a variety of positions, and it is hardly possible to do justice to the skills I learned, the opportunities I had, and the friendships I gained during that time.
Early professional life
My first task at the Center was to build a searchable database of internship opportunities for our students interested in the European Union. Starting with a directory of Brussels-based organizations, companies, and lobby offices, I contacted all of them to inquire about any internships they offered. I added a few Florida and US based organizations and taught myself enough coding to create a searchable online form. I also helped with various tasks at the office, including outreach and the newsletter publication. When the first Assistant Director for the Center resigned, Amie promoted me to the position. Thirty years old I had my first full time job with benefits! Wanting to keep one foot in academia, I opted for a job description that allowed for some teaching, typically one course a year, plus the occasional study abroad.
My other tasks at the Center were varied and variable depending on what was needed. I (and others) helped Amie with program development, grant writing, data collection for the grants, processing the applications (and awards) through the Grants Office, reporting on grants’ objectives, etc. I was the back up for all the other positions – outreach, budget, academic advising – much of which required endless hours of certifications to use PeopleSoft business applications. Planning, organizing, and hosting academic and outreach workshops was among my most favorite activities, and I did my share of talks on subjects ranging from Balkan cuisine to trading with the EU.
Very little in a PhD program prepares you for work in an office environment, supervise staff, manage budgets, or generally navigate university administration, and network professionally. Thanks for my work at the Center though, I started my UIC position with significant and invaluable experience in all these areas. Many of those skills come in handy for faculty at some point in their careers, and I am grateful I acquired them early on.
Catching up on research
My position at the Center (and the unrelenting support that Amie provided me with) allowed me the flexibility to maintain a research agenda, and I regularly attended academic conferences although I was barely successful in publishing. I managed though to accrue enough almost-ready-to-go-out papers to put me on a rather productive research trajectory after I started at UIC (despite subsequent slowdowns due having a child in my second year on the tenure track, and a family illness-in the fourth). Three streams of research stand out as unexpected long-term projects.
Daniela Dimitrova and I went to the same college and knew each other casually then. We re-connected in Gainesville during my early years of work in the Center when Daniela was finishing up her PhD at UF. We stayed in touch when she left for Iowa State, and in 2009 we had an opportunity to work together after I obtained a faculty enhancement grant to collect data on media coverage of elections in Bulgaria. My graduate school experience with content analysis as Jeff Mondak’s Research Assistant came in very useful. Daniela and I spent months at the National Library in Sofia photographing newspaper stories, going back through the archives to the first elections in 1990. Newspapers from back then were printed on low quality paper, many pages were crumbling and the ink was fading, and it was very useful that we were able to document these stories as they were not digitized; soon after our visits, the library prohibited the photographing of archival materials. Having obtained the news stories, we assembled coders (ourselves included) and spent many more months building a dataset that we then used in several publications.
In Spring 2008 as a group of us was getting ready to fly to the annual meeting of MPSA, our fight from Gainesville to Atlanta was cancelled, and we were taken by a van to Jacksonville for a direct flight to Chicago. I arrived just in time to catch a taxi to the Palmer House, suitcase in tow. After the presentations, an audience member put me in touch with Elin Naurin who the next year convened the first workshop for the Comparative Party Pledges Group (CPPG). The nearly missed MPSA presentation put me on a productive research path that I continue to this day. My MPSA paper while on mandate theory was empirically more similar to Susan Stokes' approach in Markets and Democracy, and after the first group workshop in Gothenburg in 2009, I decided to apply the pledge approach to Bulgarian manifestos. Thankfully, the Manifesto Project sent me their collection of election programs of Bulgarian political parties (and I was able to supplement a few others from the archives in Sofia). Many more months of coding ensued, especially slowed down by the fact that the election programs I had were in jpg format which required retyping the text into word/excel for the purposes of the pledges dataset. Two subsequent CPPG workshops (in Lisbon 2010 and Gothenburg 2011) allowed us the time to fine-tune the within-group differences, and coordinate the data collection and organization in ways that made it comparable across countries. We presented our (individual and group) work to multiple conferences, and undertook to write articles and a book out of this project. As this project is winding down, several of us continue to work together on spin-off projects.
My work on pledges led to a collaboration with Magda Giurcanu for a workshop that Amie Kreppel's Jean Monnet Center for Excellence organized at UF in 2015. Magda and I assembled an impressive dataset on pledges by Europarties, with one article in print, and two others in progress coming out of this project. Another example of a 'accidental' work is my collaboration with Maria Popova, which began after we both commented on the same Facebook thread for the Why We Study Eastern Europe group, and Joshua Tucker invited us to write a report on the 2013 Bulgarian legislative elections for the Monkey Cage blog; we turned that report into an article, and thanks to the fickle Bulgarian politics we were able to do another report (and another article) the following year.
Since my CV does not do justice to the paths I took in my academic career, I thought it was a good idea to write down my ‘story’. I am sharing it not because it is an atypical one (it’s likely not) but because in so many ways and so unexpectedly it has prepared me for academic life. Many of the decisions I made seemed random at times, and many accidental events took my professional life in major new (and largely unplanned) directions. The skills that I acquired in the process made me the researcher that I am today.
The story is written tongue-in-cheek-ishly at times. Thanks for reading.
Early years
When I was growing up in Bulgaria during the 1970s and 1980s, becoming a college professor did not feature in any conversations I had as a kid. There were college professors in the country, of course, but how one became such was never discussed in my family or schooling. The field of Political Science didn't even exist. The closest area taught in the universities at that time would have been Theory of Marxism, or perhaps History/Sociology. What to become when I grew up took a very different form.
Despite being a daughter of two engineers, early on it was determined that I was not good at math. Relatively speaking (esp. for a Bulgarian), I am not good at math. I was not that great at writing or literary studies either. But I was fairly good at memorizing facts, and I was curious about the natural world, so I gravitated towards biology and chemistry. So, I was going to be a medical doctor. In middle school, I started preparing for entrance exams of the local high school specializing in natural sciences and math. I did not consider the slightly more prestigious language-focused high school due to my lower aptitude (although not necessarily grades) in literary studies.
Entrance exams were in the subject of choice, in my case biology as a first preference, and chemistry as a back up. To prepare for the exams, my friends and I took private lessons with a local teacher. Those consisted of memorizing the material the teacher gave us, and going to her house before school started (6:00-7:00am) to recite what we had learned the day before. It paid off and I got the maximum on the entrance exam earning a spot on the biology track, the second most competitive track after math. The exam for chemistry was super easy for me but chemistry was not as prestigious so I enrolled in biology. This track was (loosely) the equivalent of a pre-med major.
My cohort in high school was part of an experimental program where the first year we undertook an intensive study of a foreign language (English for most, with one class in French), in addition to the selected track. I had started studying English in second grade after my mother learned that a cousin had been signed up for language lessons. Studying English as an extracurricular activity at that time (early 80s) consisted of listening to tapes of lessons produced by the British Council, and repeating what we heard. We also did a lot of copying by hand, and memorizing words and grammar rules. On tests (and there were many), each spelling mistake led to a .25 point deduction, grammar mistakes – .5 point. On a grading scale from two to six, four spelling mistakes would bring down your grade by a full unit. None of my teachers before high school were trained in the communicative method of language learning, so it was good I was so great at memorization.
I started high school with over ten years of English learning. Our first year, grade 8th, we took two subjects - Biology and English, each for about three periods a day, every day. We likely also had gym class but I was so terrible at it too, I must have blocked this off. After the first year, other subjects were added: History, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, Literature. My first year of high school coincided with the end of the communist regime. For us that meant that the instruction of English became more fun, on Fridays, we listened to and learned Western pop and rock songs. Pink Floyd’s The Wall was a popular one, as were all the Beatles songs. The opening of the wall also meant that we got a Peace Corp volunteer to assist with English language instruction, opening the doors to learning methodologies such as conversation! He also organized a class trip to the newly opened American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), and a handful of us went on the trip.
In the meantime, I was still going to be a medical doctor. Anesthesiologist to be precise, and my good friend at that time – a surgeon. Preparing for entrance exams at medical schools is no joke, each school conducts its own testing; there are no standardized exams, only a vague notion (and leaked questions) of what might be asked. A handful of teachers in our town had a solid reputation of successfully preparing high school students for those exams, and we had one of them as our Biology teacher. Our studying took the following form: in class, the teacher would dictate to us supplements to the assigned textbook, telling us where to add what text, what to delete perhaps. We took notes, then memorized the text and the additions, and were asked to recite it in class for a grade. For the non-major track subjects, such as Physics, we just memorized what was in the textbooks.
Thanks to the new possibilities, my friend (the future surgeon) and I were also going to study medicine in the US. We (she mostly) somehow convinced the high school principal to allow us to skip our fifth year to be able to prepare for the SAT exam. This required us to take two years of courses in one, and being examined on the material in front of the class. We didn’t graduate early but having shown good memorization of the subjects, we were allowed to not attend most of high school in the last year. We studied for the SAT and applied to colleges in the US. I was rather selective in my applications, didn’t score enough to be offered financial aid, and chose my back-up school, the American University in Bulgaria. My friend started at the University of Mississippi, and is now a Hopkins-educated, Harvard-trained cardio-thoracic surgeon, tenured at U Mass.
College and graduate school
I found myself having to figure out what to study at AUBG, after all these years of memorizing biology textbooks. In 1993, International Relations seemed most appealing so that’s what I majored in. Even though I took classes that I would later consider comparative politics, they were not exactly called that, and frankly I hardly knew the field existed. But I gained some research experience, and got determined to study in the US, at least for my masters. Except that very few schools in the US offer financial aid for international students pursuing a terminal masters degree. So I accepted an offer for a fellowship in the PhD program at Florida State University (FSU). I had very little appreciation of the differences in research methodologies in our discipline but it turned out that I was not that bad in math, and I managed fairly well in the program.
At FSU I learned that there is a field of comparative politics, and was drawn to it, rather than to the conflict studies that dominated the IR subfield in the department at that time. Having just arrived in the US for the first time abroad, with one suitcase, and not knowing anyone in the country other than my surgeon friend (then a student at Northeastern University), I had to figure out a research path for myself. I left Bulgaria in 1997, after years of failed reforms and in the midst of hyperinflation, and understanding the politics of economic reform was most interesting to me. Initially, I toyed with the idea of working on a topic similar to the Manifesto Project, of which I first heard in college when Prof. Hans Dieter Klingemann gave a talk to my junior class. While I found the subject of mandate democracy as applied to the post-communist world to be an immensely interesting research conundrum, at that point in my studies, I was not sure how I’d contribute to this stream of research. My PhD advisor, HeeMin Kim (who had done work related to the Manifesto Project), and I had a conversation of whether I could possibly find a niche to work on the subject, or I could go in a direction of research that is less explored. The did the latter, and years later I returned to my original passion of studying party positions, and was able to find ways to contribute to this research area.
My dissertation dealt with the seemingly (at that time) incompatible nature of the dual political and economic transitions undertaken by many post-communist countries. Looking beyond the more general definitions of ‘market’ and ‘democracy’, I asked what types of democratic institutions support what types of market reforms. To assess this question, I needed data that was not available at the time, and that went beyond the IMF ratings and EBRD reform scores. In particular, what specific decisions about individual economic reform components did each government take, and when? First, I had to determine what are the reform components, e.g. prices of what products were liberalized; what legal aspects were changed to introduce elements of the market; what was to be privatized. I compiled a list of products, goods, services, laws that needed changing. Then, I found a way to trace (thank you wire AP services and Lexis-Nexis) what government action was taken when, for 19 countries between 1989 and 2000. The data reflected if the government planned to take action in each specific area, deliberated it, or approved it. Similarly, did it take any of these steps to reverse progress with marketization? Then, I needed to account for types of governments, other institutions, and other explanations of government actions. In short, I found that socially painful reforms that have the potential to hurt specific groups of ‘losers’ are facilitated by institutional factors that restrict decision-making. On the other hand, reform policies that can benefit broader segments of society are successful when more decision-makers are included. Later on, I expanded the study to include specific cases of governments in each category, across ten democracies. I was not successful in placing this research as a publication but I still think it was a neat project. The skills I learned (coding and dataset building), and the broader questions I asked – how institutions shape government decisions, and how different visions of representation affect policies - came in handy in my subsequent research.
I spent the last year of my PhD program away from campus, writing, and upon graduation found myself living in a new city where I hardly knew anyone, and without a job. My first adjunct position was for my former department, and required me to commute 2.5h each way twice a week. It was hardly possible to rent another apartment, although I did crash in with friends a few times. We had one unreliable car, so I had to rent a vehicle each week to go teach; most of my paycheck went into car rentals but I did get more independent teaching experience, and the following semester I was hired to adjunct for the Dept of Political Science at the University of Florida, in Gainesville where we lived. Towards the end of the semester, I was chatting with a faculty member who was organizing a regional conference, and he mentioned in passing that a colleague of his had some grant money and was looking to hire someone to help with a project.
I then walked into Amie Kreppel’s office to ask about this opportunity, and she pretty much on the spot hired me as the Internship Coordinator of the newly established Center for European Studies. I worked at the Center for eight years in a variety of positions, and it is hardly possible to do justice to the skills I learned, the opportunities I had, and the friendships I gained during that time.
Early professional life
My first task at the Center was to build a searchable database of internship opportunities for our students interested in the European Union. Starting with a directory of Brussels-based organizations, companies, and lobby offices, I contacted all of them to inquire about any internships they offered. I added a few Florida and US based organizations and taught myself enough coding to create a searchable online form. I also helped with various tasks at the office, including outreach and the newsletter publication. When the first Assistant Director for the Center resigned, Amie promoted me to the position. Thirty years old I had my first full time job with benefits! Wanting to keep one foot in academia, I opted for a job description that allowed for some teaching, typically one course a year, plus the occasional study abroad.
My other tasks at the Center were varied and variable depending on what was needed. I (and others) helped Amie with program development, grant writing, data collection for the grants, processing the applications (and awards) through the Grants Office, reporting on grants’ objectives, etc. I was the back up for all the other positions – outreach, budget, academic advising – much of which required endless hours of certifications to use PeopleSoft business applications. Planning, organizing, and hosting academic and outreach workshops was among my most favorite activities, and I did my share of talks on subjects ranging from Balkan cuisine to trading with the EU.
Very little in a PhD program prepares you for work in an office environment, supervise staff, manage budgets, or generally navigate university administration, and network professionally. Thanks for my work at the Center though, I started my UIC position with significant and invaluable experience in all these areas. Many of those skills come in handy for faculty at some point in their careers, and I am grateful I acquired them early on.
Catching up on research
My position at the Center (and the unrelenting support that Amie provided me with) allowed me the flexibility to maintain a research agenda, and I regularly attended academic conferences although I was barely successful in publishing. I managed though to accrue enough almost-ready-to-go-out papers to put me on a rather productive research trajectory after I started at UIC (despite subsequent slowdowns due having a child in my second year on the tenure track, and a family illness-in the fourth). Three streams of research stand out as unexpected long-term projects.
Daniela Dimitrova and I went to the same college and knew each other casually then. We re-connected in Gainesville during my early years of work in the Center when Daniela was finishing up her PhD at UF. We stayed in touch when she left for Iowa State, and in 2009 we had an opportunity to work together after I obtained a faculty enhancement grant to collect data on media coverage of elections in Bulgaria. My graduate school experience with content analysis as Jeff Mondak’s Research Assistant came in very useful. Daniela and I spent months at the National Library in Sofia photographing newspaper stories, going back through the archives to the first elections in 1990. Newspapers from back then were printed on low quality paper, many pages were crumbling and the ink was fading, and it was very useful that we were able to document these stories as they were not digitized; soon after our visits, the library prohibited the photographing of archival materials. Having obtained the news stories, we assembled coders (ourselves included) and spent many more months building a dataset that we then used in several publications.
In Spring 2008 as a group of us was getting ready to fly to the annual meeting of MPSA, our fight from Gainesville to Atlanta was cancelled, and we were taken by a van to Jacksonville for a direct flight to Chicago. I arrived just in time to catch a taxi to the Palmer House, suitcase in tow. After the presentations, an audience member put me in touch with Elin Naurin who the next year convened the first workshop for the Comparative Party Pledges Group (CPPG). The nearly missed MPSA presentation put me on a productive research path that I continue to this day. My MPSA paper while on mandate theory was empirically more similar to Susan Stokes' approach in Markets and Democracy, and after the first group workshop in Gothenburg in 2009, I decided to apply the pledge approach to Bulgarian manifestos. Thankfully, the Manifesto Project sent me their collection of election programs of Bulgarian political parties (and I was able to supplement a few others from the archives in Sofia). Many more months of coding ensued, especially slowed down by the fact that the election programs I had were in jpg format which required retyping the text into word/excel for the purposes of the pledges dataset. Two subsequent CPPG workshops (in Lisbon 2010 and Gothenburg 2011) allowed us the time to fine-tune the within-group differences, and coordinate the data collection and organization in ways that made it comparable across countries. We presented our (individual and group) work to multiple conferences, and undertook to write articles and a book out of this project. As this project is winding down, several of us continue to work together on spin-off projects.
My work on pledges led to a collaboration with Magda Giurcanu for a workshop that Amie Kreppel's Jean Monnet Center for Excellence organized at UF in 2015. Magda and I assembled an impressive dataset on pledges by Europarties, with one article in print, and two others in progress coming out of this project. Another example of a 'accidental' work is my collaboration with Maria Popova, which began after we both commented on the same Facebook thread for the Why We Study Eastern Europe group, and Joshua Tucker invited us to write a report on the 2013 Bulgarian legislative elections for the Monkey Cage blog; we turned that report into an article, and thanks to the fickle Bulgarian politics we were able to do another report (and another article) the following year.