Dataset of Articles in Comparative Politics (DACP)

Authors: Andreas Schedler (cide, Mexico City) & Cas Mudde (DePauw University)

Contact: andreas.schedler@cide.edu & casmudde@depauw.edu

Citation:

Andreas Schedler and Cas Mudde, “Dataset of Articles in Comparative Politics
(DACP), Political Research Quarterly 63/2 (June 2010), http://prq.sagepub.com.

Public repository:

Political Research Quarterly (http://prq.sagepub.com) & CIDE Data Archive for
Applied Research in the Social Sciences (http://biiacs.cide.edu/).

Version 2.0 (November 2009)

Dataset Description

The dataset was constructed to serve as empirical input for a journal article on “Data Usage in Quantitative Comparative Politics” (by Andreas Schedler and Cas Mudde, published in Political Research Quarterly 63/2, June 2010, 417–433). The article pursued three basic purposes: (1) to trace the evolution of quantitative methods in the comparative study of politics over the past two decades; (2) to describe general trends and patterns of date usage in comparative politics; and (3) to estimate the degree of dataset concentration by counting frequencies of usage of particular datasets. 

To accomplish these purposes the dataset contains three groups of data: (1) some basic information on a sample of both quantitative and qualitative comparative politics articles that appeared in six prominent English-language journals between 1989 and 2007: their country coverage, their regional coverage, and their thematic focus; (2) information the nature of the datasets used in quantitative comparative research: their geographic scope (national, regional, or worldwide) and their originality; (3) the listing of all pre-existing individual political datasets used quantitative articles. 

Sample Description

The Dataset of Articles in Comparative Politics (DACP) contains a sample of 581
comparative studies that were published in leading academic journals between
1989 and 2007.

Journals: The dataset codes articles from three leading comparative politics
journals, World Politics (WP), Comparative Politics (CP), and Comparative
Political Studies (CPS), as well as the three leading general political science
journals, American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of
Political Science (AJPS), and Journal of Politics (JOP).

Sample: The sample comprises all articles in comparative politics that were
published in six selected journals during full calendar years at three-year intervals
from 1989 through 2007.

Comparative politics: We classified as comparative research those articles that
presented empirical studies of domestic politics in any country except the US. This
US-centric definition ex negativo excludes studies of American politics. Following
convention, it also excludes the field of international relations (the study of
interstate relations, international diplomacy, international organizations and
regimes). We consider work on the domestic consequences of international factors
as comparative. The same applies for studies of civil war, even if dominated by
nominal IR scholars. We classified studies of the European Union as an
organization as IR, studies of the politics of EU member states as comparative.

Empirical research: The notion of empirical research excludes four categories of
work (unless they contain some kind of systematic empirical inquiry): theoretical
articles (spanning from political philosophy to formal theory); concept and
measurement analyses; methodological discussions (on research methods,
research design, and the logic of scientific inference); and laboratory experiments
(even if conducted outside the US).

Journal articles: The sample includes full journal articles only, excluding “minor”
categories like review articles, research notes, and special issue introductions.
Coding Process & Reliability

Sample: The comparative politics articles were identified by two independent
coders. Although we refrained from computing reliability scores, their degree of
agreement was high. Disagreements arose in less than a dozen of articles (from a
pool of several hundred pieces). In these controversial cases, we opted for
including the controversial article (“in dubio pro reo”).

Research Method: The classification of articles by research method was
conducted by two independent coders. Their percentage of agreement lay at 94.8
percent. Only 30 out of 581 were coded differently by the two coders.
Disagreements went both ways: fifteen cases were classified as qualitative by
coder 1 and quantitative by coder 2; another fifteen the other way round. We had a
third coder (one of the authors) revise these cases. As he found, most of the
disagreements were due to coding errors. In twelve cases of “optical illusions,”
one coder had classified articles as quantitative that contained a fair amount of
formally presented quantitative data, yet no statistical data processing. In
seventeen cases of “oversight,” one coder had classified articles as qualitative,
although the authors did support their arguments through some kind of statistical
inference. In one case, the procedure of data processing was rather opaque, yet did
seem to involve statistical techniques of data reduction. The list of these 30
articles and explicit justifications for coding their research methods one way or
the other are available from authors upon request.

Substantive themes: Primary substantive areas of research were classified by two
independent coders. Their level of agreement lay at 75.8 percent. Although it is
open to debate what constitutes an acceptable level of inter-coder reliability, a
reasonable rule of thumb establishes that their convergence should be higher than
70 percent. We submitted the cases of disagreement to revision by a third coder
(one of the authors) whose double task was to identify eventual coding errors as
well as to arbitrate ambiguous cases. Placing multi-thematic articles into one of
several plausible thematic categories is not a matter of wrong or right. It calls for
judgements that strive to minimize the inevitable loss of information. In 66.8
percent of the 147 articles in disagreement, the third coder sided with coder 2, in
29.6 percent with coder 1, and in 3.6 percent he took an independent decision
(detailed information available from authors upon request).

Research design and types of datasets: Given the rather unproblematic nature of
the factual information to be captured, the country coverage and regional coverage
of comparative research was coded by a single coder who consulted with the
authors in case of doubt. The same procedure was followed for establishing the
geographic reach and originality of datasets.