In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1
Political observers have expressed concern about the failure of some Americans to uphold democratic principles. We argue that support for antidemocratic authoritarian governance is associated with some whites’ psychological attachment to their racial group and a desire to maintain their group’s power and status in the face of multiracial democracy. Drawing on historical work, we posit that whites’ efforts to restrict democracy are deeply rooted in America’s past; and we present empirical analysis demonstrating that today, whites with higher levels of racial solidarity are notably more supportive of authoritarian leadership than whites who do not possess a racial group consciousness.
In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court inSmith v. Allwrightshocked the southern body politic by invalidating the white-only Democratic primary. Interpreting the eleven states of the old Confederacy as enclaves of authoritarian rule, this article views Smith as beginning a long process that culminated in the early 1970s with the consolidation of democratic rule in America. Smith v. Allwright transformed the politics of all eleven enclaves, challenging rulers in their roles both as party officials and as lawmakers. Filtered through various configurations of intraparty conflict, political institutions, and black insurgency, however, the ruling shaped the politics of each enclave differently. This article compares the ruling's effects on three similarly-situated enclaves—Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It suggests how Smith v. Allwright positioned these enclaves differently as they faced several other democratization challenges over the next three decades. The article closes with a discussion of how southern enclaves ultimately took divergent paths out of Dixie, why these different modes of democratization matter today, and how the reframing of southern political history developed here engages with recent research on America's distinctive democratic development.
Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, whereas most racial conservatives—largely whites—vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican Governor Earl Warren's well-known support for fair employment practices (FEP) legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.
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