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American (Data) Exceptionalism

- July 5, 2012

University of Toronto political scientist Ed Schatz sends along the following comment regarding a recently published article. Readers should note that he managed to convince the editors of Politiy to ungate the article in conjunction with this post in The Monkey Cage – so perhaps another model worth trying to make more research accessible to a larger audience. Here’s the comment:

America may be “exceptional,” but American political scientists tend to assume otherwise. In a recent paper in the journal Polity (ungated version) Elena Maltseva and I show that political scientists writing in their flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, have generally assumed that data emerging from the U.S. context are applicable to other country-contexts. Fair assumption? Useful assumption? We think not.

Here’s our abstract:

Edward Schatz and Elena Maltseva, “Assumed to be Universal: The Leap from Data to Knowledge in the American Political Science Review,” Polity, June 2012.

The language scholars use to describe research findings has potentially enormous implications for how a science of politics develops. Consider the history of marked and unmarked terms in the American Political Science Review. Modifiers that mark reported data as spatially or temporally “different” (versus linguistically leaving the data unmarked and thus implying that the information is universal and “normal”) reflect predominant power relations. Marking, furthermore, can contribute to future power relations. Finally, knowledge claims that are made without acute attention to the marking of data are likely to be faulty. Because the implications for a science of politics are neither politically nor analytically innocent, political scientists should reveal (rather than conceal) and foreground (rather than background) the geographic and temporal origins of their data.

From this, a modest proposal: let’s “foreground” where our data come from! Whatever generalizations emerge will be far better grounded.