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Data for: An empirically informed analysis of the ethical issues surrounding split liver transplantation in the United Kingdom
No full textThis is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.
This manuscript was written as part of an ‘empirical bioethics’ project on the ethics of split liver transplantation. Empirical bioethics is a relatively new approach to bioethical enquiry, whereby empirical data (often qualitative, gathered via interviews or focus groups) is combined with a philosophical ethical analysis. Conventional, philosophical bioethics has been subject to some criticism on the grounds that it is empirically-starved, and therefore lacks ability to address nuanced ethical issues as they manifest in practice. Whether these criticisms are entirely fair is debatable, but empirical bioethics has arisen as a response. The role of empirical data in bioethical analysis can be complex because it tends to describe how things are, whereas normative bioethics makes claims about how things should be. The purpose of empirical data in this manuscript was to highlight some of the ethical issues that arise in relation to split liver transplantation, and to feed ideas from those who experience these ethical issues into a brief subsequent ethical analysis.The evidence-base for this manuscript was existing medical literature on split liver transplantation, and – most significantly in this manuscript – qualitative interviews conducted with liver patients and staff working in transplantation. These participants were identified by the research team as key stakeholders in the practice of split liver transplantation.Data Generation
Medical literature was searched to provide data on the risks and benefits of split liver transplantation, some of known ethical issues, as well as the more general situation regarding liver transplantation (e.g. waiting times). This manuscript was published in a ‘Bioethics beyond borders’ special edition of the journal, so there was a need to situate the ethical issue within the UK context.
Qualitative data were gathered for a specific purpose - to inform an ethical commentary on split liver transplantation – and the requirements of this purpose entailed that specific types of data were sought. We wanted to know about participants’ experiences of liver transplantation, but also their views on the rights and wrongs of splitting livers, and the types of ethical reasoning that they use. Semi-structured interviews were used, the topic guide for which was based upon ethical issues in the literature and in consultation with clinical members of the research team. For example, one of the known ethical issues in split liver transplantation is the slightly increased risk to the adult recipient of a split liver graft, so some questions focussed on patient perceptions of the acceptability of increasing risk for adults in order to benefit children. Within the interviews, the researcher deliberately (albeit gently) challenged and questioned views, in order to gain insight not just into the views themselves, but also the reasoning behind them. All participants gave informed consent prior to participation in interviews, and were informed that their words may be used in publications and reports resulting from the research.
We decided when designing the project that it was important to obtain a range of perspectives and experiences. We therefore interviewed patients who were pre- and post-transplant, and patients who had received split or whole livers. We also interviewed a range of transplant staff, including surgeons and clinicians from both adult and paediatric liver transplant units. We did not interview paediatric recipients, family members of recipients, or patients for whom participation in an interview would have proven too burdensome (as determined by clinical staff during participant selection). Including these groups of participants could have provided valuable different perspectives, but there were good reasons to exclude them. For example, including patients who remain seriously ill following a liver transplant (particularly if they had experienced severe complications related to receiving a split-liver) could have provided an interesting perspective regarding the additional risks involved, but nevertheless it would not be ethical to ask people to participate in an overly burdensome research encounter.
Given the nature of the interview data, it is important to be clear that our empirical claims are not intended to be applied far beyond our participants. Our data inform our subsequent discussion, and we use them to explore lines of ethical argument, but this does not mean that our discussion considers all ethical issues experienced within split liver transplantation, or even the most common ones.
Data Analysis
Interview data were analysed using a semi-directed content analysis. Because of the purpose of data collection – to inform an ethical analysis –, and because the data was coded and analysed by a bioethicist, the codes used throughout the analysis tended to reflect, or be tied relatively closely to, concepts that were plainly ethical in nature. For example, there are several codes related to different aspects of risk, different conceptions of equality/equity and emotions versus reasons. Coding was initially open to the extent that predetermined codes were not simply applied from the top-down, but it was unsurprising that ethical codes were most prevalent, given that they aligned with the design of the topic guide, and ensured that the results of the analysis would be of utility to an ethical discussion.
Logic of annotation
Due to the nature of this manuscript, I believed it would be most useful to focus annotations primarily on claims about the views of the study participants, as these form the basis of the novel empirical foundation for the ethical analysis. These claims are fed into the subsequent ethical discussion, so it seems important that they are transparent. Within the annotations I have tried to include additional context to the quoted text, by providing longer excerpts than those within the original manuscript.
Ideally it would have been possible to make full interview transcripts available, but for ethical reasons we have been unable to do this. Participants were informed before taking part in the research that their words might be used within publications, but not that their full transcripts would be made available. Given the small liver transplant population in the UK, and particularly given the small number of staff working within liver transplantation, it would have been difficult to be confident that even fully anonymised transcripts were sufficiently non-identifiable. </p
The Deterrence Project
No full textThe study of interstate conflict, in general, and crises in particular, has a long and distinguished history at the University at Buffalo, not only in the department of political science, but in the departments of psychology, history, philosophy, and anthropology as well. In 1967 the University founded the Center for International Conflict Studies. Directed by Glenn H. Snyder, the Center's focus was on negotiation and bargaining. The Center produced one major work, Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing's Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises. Published in 1977 by Princeton University Press, this classic contribution remains relevant today. It was republished by Princeton in 2015.
The theory of interstate crisis developed in Conflict Among Nations tested a number of deductive theories and models using sixteen case studies, some of which were themselves book length, written by five faculty members, one research associate, and five graduate students at the University at Buffalo. The main purpose of this project is to make these case studies, a number of working papers, and other products of the Center available to the academic community.
Snyder and Diesing report that they based their test of several deductive theories and models on a number of case studies. Thirteen in-depth studies were written up. Three
others, the Bosnia crisis of 1908, the United States and Japan crisis of 1940 to 1941, and the Yom Kippur "alert crisis" of 1973 were studied but not fully developed. The
Balkans crises of 1912 - 1913, and the Syrian-Jordan crisis of 1970 were examined "less intensively". Snyder and Diesing both took notes on theoretically relevant aspects of the case studies, which are provided as well.
In addition to the case studies, nine working papers were written under the auspices of the Center. Working Paper # 1 is the original typescript of Glenn Snyder's seminal "'Prisoner's Dilemma' and 'Chicken' Models in International Politics" which was subsequently published in International Studies Quarterly in 1971. Working Paper # 8 does not exist as a separate document. Working Paper #7, however, contains two distinct sections, the second of which may have been intended as a separate document.
In addition to the working papers, some related material is provided. One is a passage that Snyder may have cut from an earlier draft of Working Paper # 1. Another is a coding sheet used by Diesing that is presumably the template he used to compose Chapter IV, "Information Processing." Two unattributed documents, both using Richardson type action-reaction models, are also included below. Paul Diesing is most likely the author of "Divided Government" and "A Non-Bargaining Model." It is possible, however, that Dean Pruitt may also have written them.</p
Data for: Healthy volunteers’ perceptions of risk in U.S. phase I clinical trials: A mixed-methods study
No full textThese data include excerpts from interviews that were part of an initial "baseline" interview as part of the HealthyVOICES study (http://healthyvoices.web.unc.edu). The study examined the risk perceptions (among other things) of healthy people who enroll for financial compensation in Phase I pharmaceutical drug trials. All the excerpts were coded with the parent code "Risk Perception." These include their initial perceptions of risk, their current general perceptions, and study-specific perceptions. Where information contained in the excerpt might have been identifying to the participant or clinic at which they participated, we redacted potentially compromising words. For our use of these data, we analyzed these risk perceptions in the article which this dataset supplements. Detailed information in our study methods can be found in that article as well as in the following published articles:
- Edelblute, H. B., & Fisher, J. A. (2015). Using "Clinical Trial Diaries" to Track Patterns of Participation for Serial Healthy Volunteers in U.S. Phase I Studies. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 10(1), 65-75.
- Cottingham, M. D., & Fisher, J. A. (2016). Risk and Emotion among Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Trials. Social Psychology Quarterly, 79(3), 222–242.
The data are organized by participant ID so that all quotes from a single participant are grouped together. However, they might not appear in the order in which they were spoken during the interview. Some excerpts have time stamps that can provide a sense of where they occurred in the interview
A qualitative study on the experiences and perspectives of public sector patients in Cape Town in managing the workload of demands of HIV and type 2 diabetes multimorbidity
No full textCurrent South African health policy for chronic disease management proposes integration of chronic services for better outcomes for chronic conditions; that is based on the Integrated Chronic Disease Model (ICDM) [1]. The ICDM argues that optimal clinical outcomes for people living with single or multi-morbid conditions can be achieved through primary healthcare (PHC) re-organisation involving improved clinical management support, clinical practice guidelines for integrated care and the use of community healthcare workers (CHWs) to assist patients with self-management. However, scant data exist on how patients with chronic multimorbidities currently experience the (re)-organisation of health services and what their perceived needs are in order to enhance the management of their conditions. To explore this phenomenon, HIV and type two diabetes (T2D) multimorbidity was used as an illustration of communicable disease and non-communicable disease convergence in the South African health system. This is due to the complexities faced in effective management of the conditions by both healthcare workers and patients [2, 3, 4] and in the Western Cape Province, are ranked to be the top two causes of mortality [5].
Data Collection
Purposive sampling was done as participants were drawn from two, public sector clinics - Ubuntu clinic that provides HIV and TB services; and Site B community health clinic provides primary health care for all other diseases, including type two diabetes. These clinics are situated in Khayelitsha, a peri-urban, largely informal township of predominantly black, Xhosa speaking South Africans in Cape Town, Western Cape Province. Inclusion criteria for patient-participants included: having both HIV and T2D multimorbidity; having initiated antiretroviral therapy (ART) and also be on treatment for T2D; be between 35 -65 years old; capable and willing to provide informed consent, and be interviewed in simple English. The inclusion criteria for healthcare worker participants included professionals working with adult chronic patients; willing to communicate in simple English and capable and willing to provide informed consent. Ten patient-participants (five male and five female) and six healthcare workers that included two doctors, two clinical nurse practitioners (CNPs) and two HIV counsellors were recruited. All healthcare workers were from Site B community health clinic, except one CNP from Ubuntu clinic [HIV Clinic]. A mix of phenomenology and grounded theory underpinned the study. Participants took part in in-depth, one-on-one, semi structured interviews that drew subjective lived experiences and perspectives of managing HIV and T2D multimorbidity. Interviews were guided by two separate semi-structured questionnaires - one for patient-participants and another one for healthcare workers. The questionnaires were based on the themes of Shippee’s Complex Cumulative Model (CCM) that explored the concepts of "patient workload" and "patient capacity"[6]. Patient-participants were asked what they had to do to care for their health, the challenges they faced in meeting these demands and the factors that helped them. Healthcare workers were asked how they provided care for patients living with HIV and type two diabetes, the challenges experienced in these cases of multimorbidity; and how they assisted in developing patient capacity. Each interview was face to face, held in confidence in a private room, audio taped and lasted for approximately an hour. A translator was present in each patient-participant interview to provide translation assistance when the participant needed to ask or answer questions in the vernacular. Interviews' transcriptions were done verbatim and in English.
Data Analysis
NVvivo computer software was used to manage the data. Data analysis was primarily done by RM with assistance from a qualitative research expert (KM). Further discussions with the qualitative research expert enabled RM to be reflexive of assumptions and biases that may have influenced the research process. Thematic content analysis was applied to the transcripts [7, 8]. This involves the researcher becoming familiar with the data through reading the data, reflecting, coding and refining codes. Deductive codes from the CCM were used; together with inductive codes derived from the data. To harmonise data derived from individual interviews, and to ensure inter-coder agreement by the two data analysts, a codebook was also developed [9]. Data from participants were then described and compared. Lastly, data were extracted and explained by in relation to the existing literature. Patient-participants in this study experienced clinic-related workload such as: two separate clinics for HIV and T2D and perceived and experienced power mismatch between patients and healthcare workers. Self-care related workloads were largely around nutritional requirements, pill burden, and stigma. Burden of these demands varied in difficulty among patient-participants due to capacity factors such as positive attitudes, optimal health literacy, social support and availability of economic resources. Strategies mentioned by participants for improved continuity of care and self-management of multi-morbidities included integration of chronic healthcare services, consolidated guidelines for healthcare workers, educational materials for patients, improved information systems and income for patients.
References
1. Mahomed OH, Asmall S, Freeman M. An integrated chronic disease management model: a diagonal approach to health system strengthening in South Africa. Journal of health care for the poor and underserved. 2014;25(4):1723-9.
2. Goedecke JH, Micklesfield LK, Levitt NS, Lambert EV, West S, Maartens G, Dave JA: Effect of different antiretroviral drug regimens on body fat distribution of HIV-infected South African women. AIDS research and human retroviruses 2013, 29(3):557-563.
3. Haque M, Navsa M, Emerson SH, Dennison CR, Levitt NS: Barriers to initiating insulin therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in public-sector primary health care centres in Cape Town. Journal of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes of South Africa 2005, 10(3):94-99.
4. Kerr EA, Heisler M, Krein SL, Kabeto M, Langa KM, Weir D, Piette JD: Beyond comorbidity counts: how do comorbidity type and severity influence diabetes patients’ treatment priorities and self-management? Journal of General Internal Medicine 2007, 22(12):1635-1640.
5. StatsSA: Mortality and causes of death in South Africa, 2014: Findings from death notification. In. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa; 2015.
6. Shippee ND, Shah ND, May CR, Mair FS, Montori VM. Cumulative complexity: a functional, patient-centered model of patient complexity can improve research and practice. J Clin Epidemiol. 2012;65(10):1041-51.
7. Green J, Thorogood N. Qualitative Methods for Health Research: SAGE Publications; 2013.
8. Bazeley P. Qualitative Data Analysis: Practical Strategies: SAGE Publications; 2013.
9. Hennink M, Hutter I, Bailey A. Qualitative research methods: Sage; 2010
Data for: China’s Governance Puzzle
No full textChina is widely viewed as a global powerhouse that has achieved a remarkable economic transformation with little political change. Less well known is that China’s leaders have also implemented far-reaching governance reforms designed to promote government transparency and increase public participation in official policymaking. What are the motivations behind these reforms and, more importantly, what impact are they having? This puzzle lies at the heart of Chinese politics and could dictate China’s political trajectory for years to come.
This extensive collaborative study not only documents the origins and scope of these reforms across China, but offers the first systematic assessment by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the impact of participation and transparency on important governance outcomes. Comparing across provinces and over time, the authors argue the reforms are resulting in lower corruption and enhanced legal compliance, but these outcomes also depend on a broader societal ecosystem that includes an active media and robust civil society.
The primary unit of analysis is the Chinese province, an administrative unit which is the primary conduit for the governance outcomes and administrative procedures being researched. Accordingly, archival research and original measurement activities focused on provincial data and resources.
Provincial interview targets were selected based on observational analysis of archival data. Efforts were made to select high leverage provinces as well as provinces that shared similar characteristics but differed on key parameters of interest.
The underlying intent of this research project was to provide practical tools and useful insights for development practitioners, Chinese policymakers, and international observers of Chinese politics. Development practitioners would ideally have improved indicators for monitoring programs supporting governance reforms, in China or elsewhere, while national and local Chinese policymakers could better evaluate the success and impact of reforms by tracking progress more precisely and tailoring new policies to build on current initiatives in effective ways. For their part, international observers and scholars would have a clearer understanding of China’s unique modes of governance, including new insights into the Chinese development model. As such, the data collected corresponds to prominent themes explored by the development community and students of comparative politics.
The present data are 22 selected elite interviews. Sensitive portions of the qualitative interview data have been redacted to protect those involved. Specifically, interviewee names and other identifiers have been redacted in most instances. Institutional and geographic affiliation has been retained in all instances.
A companion dataset with quantitative indicators and replication files is available via the Harvard Dataverse.</p
Data for: The unstoppable glottal: Tracking rapid change in an iconic British variable
No full textThis is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.
We have concentrated on a number of key stages of sociolinguistic research, with specific reference to collection, processing and statistical analysis of data.
Recordings of speech data: we are linguists working on speech data, yet we rely on written data to convey the core materials we work with. We thus include examples of actual speech recordings to provide concrete support for our claim that the data we are working with diverges significantly from mainstream norms.
Data preparation and coding
Transcription – example of protocol in action: the transcription of speech data must satisfy two, often competing, criteria: it has to be 1) an accurate reflection of what was actually said and 2) transparent and accessible for analysis. How this is achieved is no easy feat, thus we include the full transcription protocol here in order to highlight the complexities in representing speech data in written format: what changes, what does not, and why.
Coding and annotation – from sound file to transcript to coded data: this phase of the research is often relegated to one or two lines in a journal article. This is highlighted by our own paper which states that ‘we extracted approx. 100 tokens per speaker per insider/outsider interview’. In this annotation we show how this is actually done, demonstrating how we isolate the linguistic variable in the original text to sound-aligned transcribed data, and how this annotation prepares for eventual extraction of the variable context under analysis.
Coding schema: the coding schema arises from two different sources: 1) what has been found in previous research; 2) observation of the current data. As such, there are multiple possibilities for what governs the observed variability. The initial coding schema sets out to test these multiple possibilities. Occam’s Razor is then applied to these multiple categories in sifting the data for the best fit, resulting in a leaner, more interpretable coda schema as presented in the final article. We have included in this annotation the original more elaborated categories to highlight the behind the scenes work that takes place in making sense of the data.
We also include sound files of the actual variants used. This allows the user to hear the different environments set out in the final coding schema as used in the object of study: spontaneous speech data.
Statistical analysis – the program used: a challenge of statistical analysis is that field constantly evolves. This annotation is a case in point where the version of the program we used is now deprecated and no longer supported. The new version is more than a superficial change to the graphical interface and represents a completely different approach in the way the models are built (stepping-up based on p-values as opposed to stepping-down from fully saturated models). The wider implication is that this can mean that analyses are not fully replicable, particularly as the software becomes obsolete, thus we provide further information on the program used to highlight this potential problem.
Statistical analysis – procedure: the description of the statistical analysis which appears in the final journal article is usually a ‘final model’ outlined in a linear fashion but the reality is a model that results from many different iterations where many different models are run and cross-referenced. The final model is a pay off between accuracy and elegance; we are aiming for the ‘best-fit’ but also the simplest or most straightforward computation. As we outline, in this case we decided to model each generation separately as this provided a clearer route to answer our research questions. However, other analysts may argue that a fully saturated model which represents all the interactions together is more accurate. Including this annotation provides further rationale for the model(s) we eventually used in the article
Constitute: Constitutional text for scholars and drafters
No full textConstitute is a web application developed for the analysis of the text of written constitutions. At the heart of the application is a set of constitutional excerpts that are encoded with tags derived from a conceptual inventory used in the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), a related dataset that records the characteristics of national constitutions since 1789. The data collection deposited with QDR is a complete set of excerpts, together with topical tags, from in-force constitutions, as well as a few draft and historical constitutions, appearing on the site as of December 26, 2017.
Data Abstract
The data include the constitutions of nearly all independent states, as identified by Ward and Gledistch, in force as of December 26, 2017. Constitute’s conceptual organization was informed by its intended use as a public-facing data product. Since Constitute is intended to be usable for members of the public as well as real-life constitution-writers and academics, the project’s texts, content tags, and conceptual inventory are all organized with an eye towards readability and parsimony. This guiding principle is most noticeable in the dataset’s conceptual inventory, which covers roughly half as many items as the original Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) variable set. Constitute’s hierarchical variable organization — enabled by the Semantic Web technology underlying the project — is informed by similar concerns. To enhance usability (both visually on the project’s website and in downstream statistical applications), Constitute’s conceptual hierarchy is oriented in a shallow but wide fashion, with few hierarchical layers and many sub-categories at each layer.
In compiling data for QDR, we included all information which is available on the Constitute website at the time of submission. These data consist of Semantic Web (.nt) files that include excerpts from nearly all in-force constitutions as of 2017, with accompanying content tags. The data follow a conceptual framework developed by the Principal Investigators in the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), a related dataset that records some 600 characteristics of national constitutions enacted since 1789. Documentation and data for that project, including data and texts for older constitutions, are available on the project website, at https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org .
Data Model
The textual excerpts are derived from the CCP’s core dataset, which records a comprehensive set of characteristics of historical constitutions. The Constitute dataset consists of two main pieces: (1) a set of conceptual tags and a related conceptual ontology; and (2) a collection of cleaned and tagged constitutional texts. Constitute tracks some 300 unique conceptual tags at the paragraph level of each individual constitution, which are organized into a hierarchical, extensible ontology. Example tags might include “Free Expression,” “Head of State Powers,” or “National Motto.” The Constitute conceptual inventory is available in QDR as an OWL file, a graph-based Semantic Web format that allows for formal descriptions of hierarchical classification schemes. In accordance with the general Semantic Web framework, OWL files can be easily expanded to include new categories and relationships, allowing researchers to extend the Constitute coding scheme for their own purposes. Each constitutional text in Constitute is represented in a related hierarchical format. Currently, the QDR sample consists of nearly all in-force national constitutions as of 2017, as well as a few draft and historical texts.
Files Description The data collection deposited with QDR is a complete set of excerpts -- together with topical tags – as they appeared on the site as of December 26, 2017. Metadata about each constitution is also provided (as an .nt file), along with the project’s conceptual inventory (as an .owl file) and copyright information (as a spreadsheet). </p
Data for: Making the real: Rhetorical adduction and the Bangladesh Liberation War
No full textThis is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.
The overarching empirical research question of the paper is “why did states recognize Bangladesh as a state?” and, more specifically, “why did (most of) the international community first condemn and then accept Bangladesh as a state?”. The goal of the empirical section of the paper was to do theory-building process-tracing of the decisions to recognize Bangladesh, that is, to build a theoretical explanation from the empirical evidence of a particular case, and then inferring that an analytically general mechanism exists.Data generation
After immersing myself in the secondary literature and the archival material that I had collected for the prior doctoral project, I had an idea for a skeleton causal mechanism, i.e. that the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh had somehow changed the status of recognition, i.e. legitimated recognition. In order to assess this idea, I then consulted some theory from international relations, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science, on how decisions are made and how arguments work, in order to hypothesize a causal mechanism. This causal mechanism, elucidated in the paper, was rhetorical adduction; basically that states try to win arguments (thus changing the behavior of relatively uncommitted audiences relative to some policy) by linking some empirical state of affairs with their argument and then bringing that empirical state of affairs about. In this Bangladesh case, this meant that some actors argued that although India’s invasion and occupation of East Pakistan made recognition of Bangladesh problematic, the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh would dismiss or undercut the critique. At this point, I formulated some observable implications of this idea, such as that if this is what had actually been going on, the states making the argument (e.g. Bangladesh and India) would have to actually have made the argument, and states would have explicitly conditioned their recognition policy decision on the withdrawal of Indian troops.
In order to find out whether there was any evidence for these observable implications, I consulted three main types of evidence; 1) public statements by state representatives in the press and at the UN (using the UN verbatim meeting records), 2) UK political and diplomatic archives and 3) US political and diplomatic archives. As it happens, the UK was heavily involved in discussions surrounding recognition and the US was not (US President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were more concerned with other issues, like supporting West Pakistan and also organizing the historic visit to the People’s Republic of China), so that almost all of the relevant evidence came from UK archives. A clear limitation of this sampling frame is that it relies on 3rd party evaluations of internal deliberations of most of the states involved. This is less of a problem than it might otherwise be because there seems little reason to explicitly condition recognition on troop withdrawal in private and secret/confidential bilateral communication with the UK if it is irrelevant to internal deliberations. If there had been some clear self-interest in misrepresenting, in this type of communication, then it would affect the plausibility of the causal claims.
I collected most of the documents used in the paper from the National Archives at Kew in the UK during two visits, one in January 2011 and another in July 2013. The first visit was to collect data for my doctoral dissertation, which was a prior, separate project from this paper. While I was finishing the Bangladesh case for my dissertation, I began to have another idea about the material. That is, I started to think that a slightly different type of conceptual/theoretical argument was relevant to a different empirical aspect of the Bangladesh case. However, as I had not had that in mind when initially collecting archival documents, I arranged a second visit to search for more information more directly relevant to this second puzzle.
The documents primarily come from a series of folders from the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices’ archives and the Premiers’ Archives that I found via two methods. First, I used the citations in Musson 2008 to identify potentially important or relevant material and then made a list of all the folders that that material was contained in. Second, I performed keyword searches for recognition and Bangladesh in the National Archives database search engine.
While I was in the archives, I made copies of almost every single document in the folders that I had previously identified. I excluded documents that were obvious duplicates or that had no readable text.
Data analysis
Data Analysis for this paper involved reading through all of the documents, constructing a detailed timeline of who said what when and who did what when, and then identifying a list of different countries that plausibly were actively engaged in the argumentation. Some countries appeared, from the documents I consulted, to be indifferent to the major lines of argumentation in the international community, either because they were so committed to a policy that argumentation had no effect, or because they only expressed parochial concerns. As detailed in the paper, I also created typologies of why states said they were conditioning recognition on withdrawal and also what counted for them as a sufficient proxy for withdrawal.
In addition to a division between states that were engaged in the argumentation and those that were not, there was also a spectrum of plausibility for a key counterfactual; if the Indians had not withdrawn troops, would this state have withheld or delayed recognition of Bangladesh? In the documents available, there is a variety of different actors within foreign ministries / departments of external affairs expressing views that range from considered, voted-upon formal policy to what someone said while at a party last night. When summarizing the data, in particular for Table 2, these subtleties had to be elided. This data supplement allows for more detailed evaluation of the plausibility of each of these claims. The main way that I interpreted the documents for this particular causal claim was that if a state representative indicated (according to the report of conversation and according to my understanding of the ordinary English language meaning of the words, including unstated implications) that the Indian troop presence was a barrier or a problem or a concern relevant to recognition, then this generally constituted a “smoking-gun” piece of evidence (Collier 2011). In some cases, the specific way that this concern was phrased or some other context downgraded the evidence to merely “straw-in-the-wind” level.
An additional point, separate from each individual document, the overall shape of the situation also factored into my judgment as to the relevance of the rhetorical adduction mechanism. While a claim about whether an individual state was actually conditioning their recognition decision on troop withdrawal might have been made based on a single report from a British diplomat, the fact that dozens of countries raised troop withdrawal as a central or even the only barrier to recognition suggests the applicability of the mechanism to the case.
Logic of annotation
In annotating this article, I focused heavily on providing access to source text that was not directly quoted in the main body of the article. I also aimed to provide access to documents that were not easily accessible elsewhere. So, for example, the Foreign Relations of the United States series is available in fulltext online (for example, here: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v11), and is keyword searchable, so providing an annotation in the Data Supplement seemed relatively superfluous. Similarly, UN Security Council records are publicly available online (for example, here: http://repository.un.org/handle/11176/74491?show=full).
In addition, with some quotations from archival documents, the context did not seem especially relevant and so a source excerpt would consist entirely, or almost entirely of the material directly quoted in the paper. In these cases, I did not annotate the citation.
The analytic notes in this Data Supplement mainly give more detail as to the identity of the actors involved and also provide, where needed, an interpretation from the words used in the document to the concepts used in the paper.
Data Overview References
Collier, David. 2011. Understanding process tracing. PS: Political Science & Politics, 44(4): 823-830
Data for: Defending hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic capital and political dominance in early modern China and the Cold War
No full textThis is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.
The theory presented in the article concerns how the evolution of fields of contestation for supremacy and position within hierarchical ‘games’ generates incentives for actors to invest even massive amounts of “tangible” resources into displays of cultural competence that have no immediate “material” payoffs commensurate with that investment. The piece applies its theorizing to two disparate cases: the “treasure fleet” expeditions under the early Ming in the early fourteenth century and to the Apollo project of manned voyages by the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s.We execute our strategy of comparing explanations drawn from our theory to those drawn by generalized families of competing explanations, as well as rival explanations driven by idiosyncratic features of the specific cases, in an analytically similar but empirically different manner. In both cases, we test our theory’s explanatory power against rival explanations using a framework drawn from recent advances in the qualitative literature; we refer to this strategy as a “folk Bayes” approach (detailed more in the Supplementary Information) and argue that it allows us to isolate observations in which our theory better predicts observance (or lack of observance) of clues associated with the case compared to rivals given intuitively plausible prior beliefs.
The differing levels of documentation available in each case (even before considering language difficulties) led to different strategies for collecting evidence to allow for this testing. In the Ming case, we drew on secondary sources. This reflects the fact that neither author reads Mandarin nor any other language implicated in the Ming treasure-fleet voyages. It also derives from the fact that we understand that even much of the “primary sources” available in Mandarin are themselves secondary sources (e.g. the Ming Shilu 明实录 or “Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty”, an official record of the Ming dynasty compiled by scholar-officials after the death of each emperor). As discussed in the case, many of the “primary sources” may have been lost not merely to time and the dislocations associated with dynastic successions in e.g. 1644, 1911, and 1949 but to specific bureaucratic sabotage during the later Ming dynasty.
The absence of such primary documentation and access to original-language literature meant that we were reliant on English-language sources. Fortunately, these include a vast array of specialist tracts. Instead of relying on standard popularizations (e.g. Levathes 2014, When China Ruled the Seas; 436 Google Scholar citations), we used works by scholars of China and Chinese history (e.g. Dreyer 2007; Needham 1971; Cham 1988, 2007; Finlay 1991). We believe that this allowed us to better survey disputes over interpretations of the voyages’ meaning and impact; furthermore, our more capacious selection mitigates the problems mentioned by Lustick (1996). We relied most heavily on those sources that themselves seemed to be closest to archaeological, documentary, and other more-primary records.
In the Kennedy case, we benefitted from greater availability of documentary records. We consulted the secondary literature (the work of John M. Logsdon and Walter A. Macdougall, as well as a dissertation by Teasel Muir-Harmony, was particularly helpful). We also consulted contemporaneous media and other sources. However, we viewed these works more as a guide to initial surveys in archival and other primary-source research. We conducted searches for relevant records in compilations of government records such as the Foreign Relations of the United States series (for both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations) and The American Presidency Project as well as searches among the CIA’s online reading room of declassified documents. Furthermore, we employed records held by the John F. Kennedy Library. Many of the Kennedy Library’s holdings have been digitized, but some have not. To collect those records that were unavailable, I visited the library in November 2016 to find and photograph relevant documents. (This required only a day of research, as opposed to the much longer periods that would have otherwise been necessary, because of the volume of records available online already, because of the narrow nature of our research interests, and because most of the processing of those records occurred offsite after my visit.) Documents were saved for later reference as computer files and prepared for sharing where necessary by converting them to PDFs. Finally, the processing of the Kennedy Library’s tapes allowed us to consult an unusually rich vein into the president’s thinking; the volumes compiled by the Presidential Recordings Project at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia helped us understand how the Moon project fit into the president’s thinking.
Our exposition of our research on the Kennedy case was limited in the text by the demands of the journal publication process. Consequently, as with the Ming case, much of our argumentation and fuller expositions of our findings are presented in a Supplementary Information.
References in this Data Overview
Levathes, Louise. 2014. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne. Open Road Media.
Lustick, Ian S. 1996. History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias. American Political Science Review 90(3):605-618.
Supplementary Information
This article’s online appendix is available at International Organization, on Harvard Dataverse, and http://www.paulmusgrave.info
Association for Legal Justice (ALJ) Human Rights Testimony, Northern Ireland
No full textThe Association of Legal Justice (ALJ) was a human rights organization formed in 1970 to catalogue the abuses suffered by residents of Northern Ireland during the armed conflict. ALJ disbanded in the early 1990s. The organization primarily focused on charging and sentencing patterns in the Northern Ireland justice system at the time. During their history, ALJ collected over 4,000 statements of abuse from victims or those who witnessed the violations. These statements were collected with a wide range of detail and identified both violent as well as non-violent events during the conflict, particularly in regards to police and state abuse.
NIRI’s collection of statements were compiled from both the personal collection of Clara O’Reilly, one of the founding members of ALJ, as well as the Father Murray Collection in the Tomas O’Fiaich Library at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, Northern Ireland