Newsletter Winter 2016 In This Issue Volume 1, Issue 2

research that does not purport to make causal claimsand predictive statements about the empirical world,but instead aims to better understand political andsocial phenomena, often from the perspectives ofindividual people whom we study. All that DA-RTwill accomplish is to create further obstacles andbarriers for qualitative researchers to publish in topjournals—an issue that has been visible fordecades10—because the burdens of DA-RTcompliance for qualitative researchers will beinsurmountable in terms of time, cost, scholarlyintegrity, and deep ethical commitments to peoplewhose confidence and trust we would betray byopening their private interactions with us to theworld.All of which brings me back to my original take onthe DA-RT wars: that this time around feels verymuch like the last time around. An effort todiscipline our discipline, provide boundaries for onekind of acceptable knowledge, and foreclosing theopportunities for a different kind of political science.A cynic might ask—so has this been the purpose ofDA-RT from the very beginning? It may not havebeen its purpose, but it will be its consequence.10On the continuing domination of positivist approaches in topjournals in International Relations, see Ayse Zarakol, "TrippingConstructivism," PS: Political Science & Politics (forthcoming).Thinking Holistically about TransparencyBy Eric Grynaviski, George Washington UniversityWhen I first heard of DA-RT, I must admit that Iwas not particularly enthusiastic. While in principletransparency is important, I worried that DA-RTcreates important disincentives for high-qualityhistorical scholarship. In reading some of the forumsdedicated to DA-RT, I have become increasinglyapprehensive. In this piece, I want to briefly relatemy concerns.Before describing my concerns about DA-RT, Iwant to first discuss why it is a good idea. Withinquantitative social science, there are importantreasons why datasets should be made available toresearchers who want to replicate analyses. Ifqualitative research follows the same template, thenthere are correspondingly strong reasons to believethat qualitative research should be equallytransparent. Making the research process transparentallows others to examine our claims and detect biasand failures of analysis. Transparency also aids inthe collaborative research enterprise by allowingothers to gain access to difficult to get materials.Despite the strong case for DA-RT, I havesignificant reservations.Does DA-RT Aid Transparency?The first question I would like to raise is whetherthere is a problem to which DA-RT responds. Ifthere is no problem, there is no need for newstandards. Supporters of DA-RT sometimes usestrident language in describing the current problem.Andrew Moravcsik, for example, describes our lackof transparency as a “crisis.”1 Reading this isinteresting. When I think about crises for qualitativescholars, I think about declining word limits thatmake detailed qualitative work impossible to presentin many journals, tightening tenure standards thatrule out multi-year qualitative projects early in one’scareer, and even the slow process of declassificationthat affects studies of U.S. foreign policy. Beforethis debate surfaced, transparency would have beenone of the last issues I would have considered acrisis for qualitative scholars. Scholars who favorimposing costly new standards should make a bettercase for why they should be a high priority forscholars interested in political history.Even if there is widespread fraud, I am not sure ifthe current discussion of standards would do muchto resolve it. My focus will be on Active Citation.Proponents of Active Citation provide the onlydetailed ideas for implementing DA-RT standards inthe publication process, suggesting a range ofoptions, from traditional citations to the creation ofonline appendices. While the reaction of qualitativescholars I have spoken to has been, in general,overwhelmingly negative, I believe that those whoworked through the idea of Active Citation shouldbe lauded for putting meat on the bones of DA-RT.Is a process like Active Citation likely to producemore transparent research?Active Citation makes two main suggestions. First,there should be a full citation to any material citedwithin a paper. Most journals already require fullcitations; those that do not should update their style1Andrew Moravcsik, “Active Citation: A Precondition forReplicable Qualitative Research,” PS: Political Science &Politics, Vol. 43, Issue 1 (2010): 29.4

guides. This aspect of DA-RT is unobjectionableand requires little change in existing disciplinarypractices. As Marc Trachtenberg notes, it wouldrequire journals like the American Political ScienceReview to change citation styles so that full citationsto archival material can easily be included so thatcitations are directly in front of the reader.2 Journalstyle guidelines could be refined and enforced, butthis does not appear to me to solve some underlyingcrisis.Thinking through the relationship of citations withintext to transparency points to deeper issues. Atpresent, scholars often feel the need to “shave”words from a manuscript, avoid complicated,interpretive discussions of documents, and reducehistorical detail in order to comply with increasinglytight word limits. As an example, while working ona paper that was published in the European Journalof International Relations, I had to make a decisionabout which cases to use to illustrate my theory. Oneset of cases relied on secondary scholarship, wherethe conventional wisdom supported my view.Another set of cases required original, historicalresearch. I had already done this research. Which didI choose? To keep within the word limit, I focusedon the less novel cases in the journal article, movingthe original historical research to a book manuscript.The key point is that the text within the paper wouldhave been the same length, but the need for citationsdrove the novel cases out of the paper because thenotes were too long. Even worse, word-of-mouthsuggests authors frequently strip citations fromimportant claims because including bibliographicinformation is too cumbersome. When scholars areasked to cut evidence to reduce the word count, weare encouraging less transparency.To encourage scholars to provide full citations, Iwould suggest not counting citations to archivalevidence as part of the word limit. This wouldencourage scholars not to reduce words byeliminating evidence or avoiding novel cases. Ibelieve this single practice would lead to tremendousgains.The second part of Active Citation calls for parts ofdocuments to be placed into a qualitative appendix,so that reviewers and readers can identify whether aquote is in fact in the document and whether thequotation is in context. I am not sure that thispractice has much value. First, I am not aware of alarge number of qualitative pieces where quotes are2Marc Trachtenberg, “Transparency in Practice: Using WrittenSources,” Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, Vol. 13, Issue1 (2015): 13–17.made up out of thin air. Why are quotes in archivalmaterials rarely invented from whole cloth? Onereason is that the vast majority of qualitativescholarship focused on archival materials inInternational Relations emphasizes documents thatanyone can easily gain access to with a minimum ofinstitutional resources. For my own research on theNixon administration, most of the documents areavailable through the Digital National SecurityArchives or other databases and services. Otherdocuments are published as part of the ForeignRelations of the United States series or otherpublications. The relevant White House Tapes areavailable online through the Miller Center at theUniversity of Virginia.3 Very few IR scholars dooriginal, archival research that draws on material notincluded in these publications.4“I believe that those who workedthrough the idea of ActiveCitation should be lauded forputting meat on the bones of DART. Is a process like ActiveCitation likely to produce moretransparent research?”Out of context quotations present a distinct problem.There are instances in which a single quotation istaken out of context. I find this practice—in our andnearly every other field—to be reasonably pervasive.The question is whether Active Citation cures thatproblem. I do not believe that it does.The primary reason is that almost all of the examplesI can find from reading others’ work relates toinadequate use of secondary sources. IR scholarsfrequently misuse authors’ conclusions when citinga secondary source. An online appendix does almostnothing to resolve this problem, for the simplereason that it is quite easy for subject matter expertsto detect these problems. When I review papers inmy area of expertise, I frequently turn to the originalsources to see if the cited work supports the authors’conclusions, especially when the citation seems3Eric Grynaviski, Constructive Illusions: Misperceiving theOrigins of International Cooperation (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2014).4Note that even when scholars do primary source archivalresearch, they often fall back on using the documents found inthese publications or databases as the key pieces of evidence.Rarely are the conclusions drawn from those sources rejected infavor of interpretations drawn from other sources.5

strange or out of context. These works are on mybookshelf, they have been read extensively, and Iknow their context. This strikes me as theappropriate way to avoid errors.for transparency would overwhelm the costs toindividual researchers. So much attention has beenpaid to these issues that it is worth noting a couple ofissues.Of course, some works slide by in the reviewprocess. The discipline should encourage ways toself-correct. One idea may be to create an additionaloutlet for publications. If someone has problemswith the empirical matter in a book, they might offerto review the book for Perspectives on Politics,emphasizing problems with evidence. If the problemis in an article, we might use online forums toreview articles or published correspondence tohighlight problems and disagreements. For thissystem to work, scholars should be encouraged tosubmit unsolicited evidentiary reviews. This posesno additional costs on researchers, and by movingthe debates into the public sphere would likegenerate the most transparency.The primary practical concern is length of theprocess. Elizabeth Saunders and Jack Snyderrecently did pilot projects in part to determinewhether it was feasible. Their reports in a recentforum in Security Studies were not promising.5 JackSnyder described “a yawning active citationsinkhole” that “was about to open up and swallowall of my free research time and my assistant’s.”6These remarks are incredible in part becauseSaunders and Snyder were supplied with researchassistants to compile material related to a singlechapter of their respective books. Snyder’sdescription of how much work was involved for solittle reward is frankly scary.What about new and novel documents, perhaps theleast frequently used kind of evidence? If a cache ofdocuments were discovered, perhaps the onlineappendix would be important, because subjectmatter experts would otherwise have little idea oftheir content. Yet, I doubt the online appendix wouldwork as envisioned. In a current book manuscript Iam working on, I am using documents concerningthe United States’ recruitment of militias, focusingon cases between 1776 and 1945; these documentsare rarely consulted. Many of the cases ofcooperation with militias in Samoa or small ethnicgroups in the Philippines have received littleattention, and therefore many of these documents areused for the first time. In these cases, I can easilyproduce quotations, whole documents, wholecollections of documents, and secondary sourcessupporting positions that I am sure are wrong. If theresearcher gets to select what to upload, the merepresence of a qualitative appendix is not particularlyheartening as a method of achieving transparency.In short, I do not believe we are in a crisis oftransparency, nor do I believe that Active Citationwould do much to solve the problem. For the smallgroup of researchers intent on defrauding thediscipline, at best it would produce new guidelinesto game.A related concern surrounds the incentives DA-RTcreates. To ask qualitative researchers, who are often“book people,” to spend several additional monthsproducing online appendices would discouragepeople from doing rigorous, primary source workduring the early phases of a career, when time ismost precious. To ask graduate students or tenuretrack faculty members to spend this much timededicated to complying with DA-RT wouldsignificantly shift burdens onto scholars interested inquality historical scholarship that are not shiftedonto other kinds of scholars.A second liability of promoting Active Citation isthat it could discount the role of history andhistoriography within texts themselves, especiallyjournal articles. If one aim of DA-RT is to improvethe handling of evidence, then a first effort might bea serious discussion about how to incorporate betterhistorical and historiographical reasoning into theevidence as it is presented to readers. My concern isthat strategies like Active Citation may movediscussions of history from the main text toappendices. I believe qualitative research wouldimprove dramatically if the opposite strategy ispursued. There are two related issues. First, debatesabout context are often really about whether adocument supports a single explanation, or whetherit also provides ground for supporting alternativeexplanations. To respond to these concerns meansIs DA-RT Dangerous?5The practice of Active Citation, on balance, wouldprovide some level of additional transparencydespite these concerns. If DA-RT did no damage tothe research process, perhaps whatever limited gainsElizabeth N. Saunders, “Transparency without Tears: APragmatic Approach to Transparent Security Studies Research,”Security Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 4 (2014): 689–98; Jack Snyder,“Active Citation: In Search of Smoking Guns or MeaningfulContext?,” Security Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 4 (2014): 708–14.6Snyder 2014: 714.6

outlining alternative explanations and placing theevidence within the context of those alternatives inan explicit, direct fashion. These discussions belongwithin a text because they are so central to thearguments. Second, taking historiographic debatesseriously—outlining the problems within theexisting literature on secondary sources andexplaining why citing out of context is appropriate—should also occur within the text. This point is alittle more subtle. Much of the work on the SpanishAmerican War and the Philippine-American Warhas happened during three periods: shortly after itoccurred,duringVietnam,andaftercounterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq. The wayshistorians write about these conflicts are informedby the political context in which they are writing. Ibelieve that one can rely on secondary sourceswhere citations are slightly out of context if onemakes a reasonable case that the context in whichthe historian wrote led her to reach the wrongconclusion. For example, one can profitably readand cite Vietnam-era sources on the PhilippineAmerican War, if one is explicit about the liabilitiesof the Vietnam-era histories that require revisingtheir conclusions. This historiographical detailbelongs within the text if the case material is to betaken seriously.Do any of these concerns mean DA-RT in the formof Active Citation is a bad idea? I do not believe so.Transparency is important. Active Citation, for someprojects where context and historiography really arenot important, may provide a mechanism to increasetransparency. Yet, I worry that the futuredevelopment of work involving international historymay be forced into a kind of straightjacket throughthe development of a single process for representingcomplicated historical evidence. Rather thanallowing authors to experiment with differentmethods of making work transparent, adopting anysingle technique might stifle innovation.In developing DA-RT, I would suggest threeprinciples. First, the implementation of DA-RTshould not impose excessive costs on juniorresearchers, deterring them from pursuing historicalwork. Second, the length of a piece should notinhibit the maximum level of transparency.Compliance with DA-RT’s principles should notmake work less rich by moving central issues intoonline appendices, moving the evidence away fromreaders and reviewers. Third, we should adopt aholistic perspective, thinking about ways toencourage reviews and correspondence to improvetransparency after publication. Thinking holisticallycould lead to more transparency, more depth, andmore interesting debates.In SumDeferred Automatic Disclosure: Ensuring DataAccess and Protecting the “Right to First Use”1By Giovanni Capoccia, University of OxfordAfter an initial period in which the debate on theappropriateness of the DA-RT guidelines forpolitical science research rightly focused on issuesof sensitivity, confidentiality, and burden of datadisclosure relevant for various forms of qualitativeresearch, the issue of properly ensuring the “right offirst use” of original datasets is now rightlybecoming an important additional topic fordiscussion. The “right to first use” refers to thepossibility of an embargo period for original dataafter the first publication of results so the researchercan make full use of the data for other publicationsbefore releasing them to the public. Although inprinciple this is an issue for all types of newlycollected evidence, it is particularly important fororiginal quantitative datasets, which are often moreimmediately usable by others than qualitative data.2Despite being included in the 2012 APSA Ethicsguidelines,3 this issue has been relatively neglectedin the DA-RT debate. This, however, is rapidlychanging. Six distinguished colleagues responded toAPSA’s decision to move forward with DA-RTdespite a popular petition to delay itsimplementation by mentioning that the DA-RTguidelines endanger “ the ability to publish out oforiginal data sets without being required to share2Most of what I say about data access and right to first useapplies to original qualitative data too. These, of course, presentdistinctive and important problems, including for example theoften excessive burden of data disclosure that the imposition ofDA-RT guidelines wo

Editor: James A. Morrison Assistant Editor: Yuan (Joanne) Yao publishing Newsletter Winter 2016 Volume 1, Issue 2 . and interview transcripts as part of a manuscript submission process, while journa