Читать книгу Political Science and Digitalization - Global Perspectives - Группа авторов - Страница 33
3 Research in political science in Mexico
ОглавлениеThe second section of this chapter focuses on research of social sciences on digital transformation. We also organized this section in four subsections: 1. General information; 2. Content aspects; 3. Institutional aspects of research; 4. Desiderata: risks and perspectives. Some other elements and information are discussed in each subsection’s notes and conclusions. A key element to understand research in Mexico is that the fields of public administration and political science are combined in major studies in several universities. This lack of separation between two areas confuses the technology implementation in teaching and researching in each of them. Digital tools are used more often on political science subjects rather than in public administration because most teachers use materials from other countries to complement their teaching practices (such as material from the USA) and there is less digital material available on public administration.
On the other hand, research topics depend mostly on every university. For example, public universities receive federal funding to sponsor their research (CONACYT, 2017) but private universities, which have no access to public funding for research, need to have some alliances with public universities or private sponsors to participate in joint projects (Binelli & Rubio-Codina 2013). Likewise, most of the research funding for social sciences is centralized in Mexico City universities, such as UNAM, COLMEX, or in the metropolitan area of some states such as the State of Mexico, Puebla, and Querétaro. The National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) also promotes high quality researchers with the creation of the National Researcher System that assesses all researchers in the country that join this policy, providing a monthly scholarship to maintain those in public universities that are part of research centers or conducting some research projects.
The national research system from CONACYT is applicable for all disciplines, not only social sciences. Nowadays, it supports more than 27,186 researchers in the country, who are evaluated by publications for JCR and SCOPUS indexes (CONACYT 2017). political science researchers are evaluated through this system. The online platform, described previously, has tools to assess projects and researchers. However, it does not promote communication and interaction between researchers. The National Council of Research & Science (CONACYT) represents a relevant component that centralizes most of the social sciences research using an online platform. This national platform for research includes the following modules or sub platforms:
• Curriculum vitae platform for Mexican researchers;
• Research projects’ platform;
• National repository access.
These platforms are combined with private organizations that sponsor mixed research and focus on national problems. They also assess the work from researchers and students nationwide. Most of the research budget focuses on Natural Sciences, Biology and Agriculture. The share of science in Mexico’s budget is only 0.4 % from our GDP (in comparison: [49] the total of all OCDE members’ share is 2.4 % GDP). Moreover, the budget for science was reduced by 24 % in 20179 (Cassani 2018).