Very close now...

0.5 hours writing, 3.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours administrivia

I'm very close now to selecting regions for a subnational comparison. The key insight today was that I don't have to know upfront what the level of police involvement looked like; I'll let the case studies tell me that. So I can proceed with selection based on the information that I have. Want to mull it over some more tomorrow, I'll probably make a final decision on Friday.

Read more about institutional design today, the most useful stuff had to do with the idea that institutions should be designed to be flexible and responsive to users' needs. This is important for me to hear, because at the moment, my argument is based on the notion of path dependence, that reforms made between 1886-1914 had a lasting impact because they codified politicized security forces, which then shaped the types of armed challenges to which the regime was susceptible going forward. To make that argument, I don't need to assume that the security forces were just frozen in 1914 and didn't change at all in 1946; but the burden is on me to trace the elements of continuity and change and argue that the latter outweighs the former, so we can speak of path dependence. But it's good to reminded that it's a question of degrees, not absolutes.

At the library this afternoon, I went over a 1961 report on criminality from the National Police. Fascinating. Aside from the weird little cartoons they used to illustrate graphs of the incidence of different types of crime by region - you could do a paper just on those - it's scary how high the murder rate was in some parts of the country at this time - 2 and 3 times the average in the U.S. that same year.

My parents just got back today from a 10-day trip to Colombia, and I was telling them last night that it was interesting to look yesterday through a Colombian electoral atlas and see the names of town where we used to go on vacation. There were a few different places, but I had never known before what direction they were from Bogota. Interesting to re-encounter childhood memories in such a remote and abstract way....

Going to another branch of the library tomorrow to get some census information that should help round out the regional selection process.