Questionable benefits, Disproportionate costs, Narrowing of future research
Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2016 1:23 am
It is not surprising that many of the concerns expressed here are from scholars in comparative politics who invest in qualitative research in quite varied regions and political environments. In fact, the latest Comparative Politics Newsletter (see link below) offers essays that underscore how the imagined benefits of a uniform cross-subfield, cross-method DA-RT policy would not come close to balancing out the very real costs that would be inflicted upon qualitative scholars in comparative politics. The latter would have to adapt their modus operandi to an extent far beyond what, say, quantitative researchers studying US voting behavior would have to do to be in full compliance with DA-RT. And to what end? As others have already pointed out, DA-RT seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Those few who are inclined to violate norms of ethical, responsible, transparent research will find ways to do so even with DA-RT procedures in place. For the rest of us, as the experience of Economics suggests, even with data-sharing and replicability rules in place, most of the field will likely not end up actually devoting the time and energy to replicate each and every finding presented across the field of comparative politics.
In the meantime, the vast majority of us already aspire to construct arguments based on evidence that we hope peer reviewers and critical readers will find to be sufficiently reliable. The marginal utility that DA-RT may bring for some types of research communities simply does not justify the hugely disproportionate costs (in terms of time, money and energy) that many other types of research communities - and particularly qualitatively oriented comparativists studying non-Western societies - will have to bear, costs that will seem prohibitive to younger scholars at institutions with fewer resources. The result? Initially, senior researchers will likely do what Professor Keck has said she would do: simply submit research to journals other than the ones committed to DA-RT and JETS. And, more of us will begin to devote more of our attention to these other journals than to those "flagship" journals of the discipline that apparently see DA-RT as necessary for their reputations and rankings. Looking ahead, the more serious and unfortunate implications for the field will be a significant narrowing of the range of approaches, substantive questions, and countries/locales to be explored by the next generation of scholars, for whom the path to jobs and tenure would be through publishing the kind of work that can be more easily made to conform to DA-RT policies. That would be a truly depressing and dysfunctional outcome for comparative politics and for the discipline writ large. The questionable benefits of DA-RT simply do not justify taking even the smallest risk that any of these scenarios would come to pass.
http://comparativenewsletter.com/files/ ... ng2016.pdf
In the meantime, the vast majority of us already aspire to construct arguments based on evidence that we hope peer reviewers and critical readers will find to be sufficiently reliable. The marginal utility that DA-RT may bring for some types of research communities simply does not justify the hugely disproportionate costs (in terms of time, money and energy) that many other types of research communities - and particularly qualitatively oriented comparativists studying non-Western societies - will have to bear, costs that will seem prohibitive to younger scholars at institutions with fewer resources. The result? Initially, senior researchers will likely do what Professor Keck has said she would do: simply submit research to journals other than the ones committed to DA-RT and JETS. And, more of us will begin to devote more of our attention to these other journals than to those "flagship" journals of the discipline that apparently see DA-RT as necessary for their reputations and rankings. Looking ahead, the more serious and unfortunate implications for the field will be a significant narrowing of the range of approaches, substantive questions, and countries/locales to be explored by the next generation of scholars, for whom the path to jobs and tenure would be through publishing the kind of work that can be more easily made to conform to DA-RT policies. That would be a truly depressing and dysfunctional outcome for comparative politics and for the discipline writ large. The questionable benefits of DA-RT simply do not justify taking even the smallest risk that any of these scenarios would come to pass.
http://comparativenewsletter.com/files/ ... ng2016.pdf