A HISTORY: ASSESSING CONSENT TO DA-RT

The APSA has played a role in the series of events leading up to the Journal Editors' Transparency Statement (JETS) (2015) signed by more than 20 editors who pledged to commit their journals to principles of access and transparency. Understanding the Association's relationship to DA-RT and JETS goes a long way to clarifying some of the policy's reception.

Although its organizers now seek to insulate APSA from the 2012 Workshop for editors and others, which launched JETS, and from its ownership of DA-RT as a policy, the claim that APSA has not been actively promoting DA-RT is at odds with other evidence: (a) APSA Committee-sponsored panels at the 2013 meeting; (b) the March 2015 PS Association News “highlight” of a Washington, D.C., workshop in which APSA executive director Steven Rathgeb Smith reported on “APSA's experiences in advancing transparency, including the Association's leadership of the DA-RT initiative” (“DA-RT Workshop Held in Washington, DC” 2015, 557); (c) the prominent position (middle column, under the banner) given to DA-RT summer and fall 2015 on the APSA homepage; and (d) the access APSA provided to DA-RT proponents at its 2015 conference breakfast for editors (as reported by PRQ editors at WPSA 2016).

DA-RT began in 2009 under then-APSA president Henry E. Brady. (See Brief Timeline in the Supplementary Material.) Three years later, the APSA Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science (2012) was changed to reflect this initiative (hereafter, Ethics Guide). Section 6 now begins, “Researchers have an ethical obligation to facilitate the evaluation of their evidence-based knowledge claims through data access, production transparency, and analytic transparency so that their work can be tested or replicated” (APSA Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights and Freedoms 2012, 9–10; emphases added). Here is where some of the problems began: the “ethical” character of obligations to provide access and transparency is simply asserted, not argued for on philosophical or other groundsFootnote ¹ ; “evidence-based knowledge,” having originated in medical practices and spread to other professional arenas, including education, social work, and criminal justice, privileges randomized-controlled trials—over interpretive and qualitative work—as exemplary science (Lincoln and Cannella Reference Lincoln and Cannella2004; Yanow Reference Yanow and Bevir2007); and testing and replication also belong to that world of experimental research designs more than to other forms of research.

Although showing a growing awareness concerning differences across political science research methods, DA-RT-related minutes from three APSA Council meetings make clear that Council called again and again for consultation with associational members before adopting DA-RT within the Ethics Guide (below; emphases added).Footnote ² Moreover, they reflect assumptions about the unified character of science that neither philosophy of (social) science nor methodological literatures support:

Unless “consultation” meant the kinds of activities listed in the 2013 minutes plus other, closed meetings, it was not carried out—at least, not widely. As Marc Lynch (Reference Lynch2016, 39) put it, the first that most APSA members knew of DA-RT was Perspectives on Politics' editor Jeffrey Isaac's June 2015 editorial on why the journal would not sign JETS. Additionally, we note an assumption implicit in the minutes' language: after the 2012 Council vote, presentations assumed the basic legitimacy of the initiative, focusing on how to “manage” data or provide “instruction” on compliance; a more transparently reflective, critical engagement—such as Deborah Yashar's (Reference Yashar2016)— is absent.

That orientation continued. The January 2014 PS symposium “Openness in Political Science,” introduced by Lupia and Elman, advocated for the initiative and invited others to join “the cause” (2014, 20, 23). In September of that same year, APSA convened a workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to focus on “the unique role academic journals play in promoting data access and research transparency” (Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement 2015; for Workshop information, see Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research 2014). The initial document presenting the Workshop states, “Convened by the American Political Science Association” (Workshop on Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) in Political Science 2014). The document has two sections: “Background” and “A Commitment to Data Access and Research Transparency.” The latter now appears on the DA-RT web site as “Journal Editors' Transparency Statement (JETS)” (2015); it is the official policy statement currently being cited; APSA's Workshop-convener role is no longer mentioned.

Eight journals were represented: American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Political Analysis. APSA was represented by executive director Steven Rathgeb Smith and then-managing editor of PS Barbara Walthall. Other participants came from the Social Science Research Council, two presses (Cambridge and Sage), various archives (ICPSR, the Qualitative Data Repository, and UK Data Archive), and numerous Centers and Institutes. (The editors of Politics & Gender and Political Research Quarterly were not invited.) That meeting led to more than 20 editors signing an October 6, 2014, statement—the Journal Editors' Transparency Statement (JETS)—requiring data archiving: as of its January 15, 2016, implementation date, the now-27 journal signatories “… shall have full discretion to follow their journal's policy on restricted data, including declining to review the manuscript or granting an exemption with or without conditions. The editor shall inform the author of that decision prior to review” (Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement 2014).Footnote ³

In short, what began in 2009 as an effort to encourage particular practices morphed, within five years and under the auspices of APSA, into a powerful force for shaping editorial practices across the discipline beyond the association, including all political scientists worldwide who would submit their work for review at these (and potentially other) journals. Objections to the DA-RT initiative were voiced at APSA conference panels and roundtables prior to the 2015 meeting in San Francisco; however, it was only the resistance voiced at the 2015 meeting that led to action.

From DA-RT's leaders' account, they sought out various views, with few results (Elman and Lupia Reference Elman and Lupia2016, 46–47). But what may seem inclusive from one perspective can appear quite exclusive from another. That DA-RT proponents saw only consensus before the 2015 meeting might be understood as resulting from a networking effect: reaching out through one's own networks likely yields participants with similar views, as assessments of interviewing's snowball method note (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012, 87). Larger dynamics, in other words, have led to divisiveness despite the intended inclusiveness. While the Ad Hoc DA-RT Committee sponsored panels and published symposia in PS, informing APSA members and inviting input, it seems not to have reached out beyond its own networks for feedback—even after cautions were sounded at various pre-2015 conference panels. Moreover, as DA-RT was initially framed as a practice to be encouraged, it is perhaps not surprising that APSA members not enthused by the idea chose initially not to get involved. It was the promised imposition of editorial requirements—drafted at the APSA-convened 2014 workshop—that prompted response just prior to and at the 2015 APSA meeting.

Following on that extensive resistance, voiced largely by researchers using qualitative and interpretive approaches, QMMR asked its members to vote on whether the section should sponsor the QTD process to develop “Community Transparency Statements” (CTSs) for those approaches.

FURTHER HISTORY: RESISTANCES

Many people have been working to encourage editors and other DA-RT proponents to reflect on the ways in which the proposed policy is not a good fit with research done in keeping with qualitative-interpretive presuppositions. As noted above, our own methodological commitments to writing reflexively on researcher positionality—i.e., enacting qualitative-interpretive modes of transparency—impel us to include mention of our own involvements, along with others'.

We started following DA-RT after attending a 2009 APSA panel focused on archiving data, which included Christian Davenport's reflections on the potential problems uploading his Black Panther-related archives would cause. Several panel papers, including his, appeared in the 2010 PS Symposium “Data Collection and Collaboration,” whose editorial opens with reference to an APSA committee proposal “to encourage authors to deposit their data in a central repository” (McDermott Reference McDermott2010, 15, emphasis added). Subsequently, in a PS symposium on Perestroika, we addressed American Journal of Political Science then-editor Rick Wilson's requirement that contributors archive their data for interpretive and qualitative research projects: field-generated data “are not amenable to being stored in a way that would facilitate another researcher's access, even if replicability were not problematized—which it often is” (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2010, 3). Later, at one of two 2013 APSA roundtables, we sought to explain why the stated position—that DA-RT is an epistemologically neutral initiative that should be mandated—disregarded well-established methodological discussions. The debate also went international: at a plenary during the week-long, February 2015 ECPR Winter Methods School in Bamberg, Germany, Robert Adcock, responding to Diana Kapeszewski, detailed the epistemological presuppositions embedded in DA-RT.

In early summer 2015, the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods APSA Conference Group's Executive Committee, of which we are members, wrote a letter to JETS signatories alerting them—in case they did not know—to the considerable ferment concerning and opposition to DA-RT principles, especially regarding their inappropriateness for interpretive and some qualitative research methods. The Executive Committee sent a second letter to editors of key journals across political science subfields who had not yet signed JETS, alerting them to the same concerns in the event they were considering signing on. Recipients included journals outside of the United States, whose editors might not be aware of the degree of dissent, knowing that APSA policies can cast a long shadow around the world. Both letters included copies of or links to supplemental materials: Isaac's editorial (Reference Isaac2015a); and essays by Timothy Pachirat (Reference Pachirat2015), Katherine Cramer (Reference Cramer2015), and Sarah Parkinson and Elizabeth Wood (Reference Parkinson and Wood2015) (all then forthcoming in the QMMR Newsletter; Büthe and Jacobs Reference Büthe and Jacobs2015) detailing DA-RT's difficulties. Peri was invited to participate in two APSA 2015 DA-RT panels: a closed session on Wednesday convened by Colin Elman and Skip Lupia, and an open one convened by APSR lead editor John Ishiyama. At the latter, Sarah Parkinson, Joe Soss, and Lisa Wedeen also spoke, eloquently, about the problems DA-RT poses for interpretive and other research. Additionally, together we organized a Wednesday Short Course focusing on DA-RT's implications for interpretive research.

Following the conference, Nancy Hirschmann, Mala Htun, Jane Mansbridge, Kathleen Thelen, Lisa Wedeen, and Elisabeth Wood organized a petition, signed by more than 1000 political scientists (including ourselves), asking JETS signatories to delay implementing DA-RT.Footnote ⁴ At WPSA 2016 we organized a roundtable assessing DA-RT from the perspective of public policy and political theory, and we have organized another for APSA 2016 on the broader context of DA-RT.

ASSESSING DA-RT AND THE “COMMUNITY TRANSPARENCY STATEMENTS” PROCESS

“Where archiving is voluntary and do-able conceptually, ethically, and methodologically, we have no quarrel with it” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012, 126). This statement concludes a section entitled “Data Archiving and Replicability” in our research design book; we still hold that view. But while we appreciate the tremendous amount of time and effort Tim Büthe and Alan Jacobs put into designing the QTD-CTS process—and the work of colleagues who are now participating in it—neither of us ended up voting on it, having arrived at that decision independently, albeit for similar reasons. Neither of us wanted to oppose a “bottom-up, participatory” effort, which we favor; but we were less sanguine about the objectives described there, and an “abstain” option was not provided. Here is the reasoning that led each of us to that decision.

For one, we are concerned with the politics of the process. Not that we think the process is “stacked” in the sense that anyone is trying to impose particular standards on “interpretivists” (or others). We take those involved to be asking, sincerely, What are your standards? Matters have been prejudged, however, in the sense that DA-RT is presumed to be desirable and necessary on its face, making the current effort one of tweaking it to make it work right. There is, in other words, a politics of science riding in here. Although Cramer, Isaac, Pachirat, Parkinson and Wood (all cited above), and, more recently, Fujii (Reference Fujii2016), Hall (Reference Hall2016), Htun (Reference Htun2016), Lynch (Reference Lynch2016), and Sil and Castro, with Calasanti (Reference Sil, Castro and Calasanti2016)—along with ourselves and others posting comments on the Dialogue on DA-RT webpage—have pointed to the narrow, exclusive definition of science that informs DA-RT, this definition is not engaged in QMMR's descriptions of the QTD process and its objectives (Qualitative Transparency Deliberations n.d.). Whereas we find ample recognition there of the plurality of qualitative and interpretive approaches, the epistemological neutrality averred by Lupia and Elman (Reference Lupia and Elman2014, 20) still appears foundational in these deliberative efforts. Specifically, research transparency is presented as a “‘meta-standard,’…broadly valued among political scientists” (Qualitative Transparency Deliberations n.d., Background, ¶2), a stance that naturalizes DA-RT. The possibility that a community might value research transparency but not see a need for DA-RT—or even find it harmful—is not recognized.

The process and its objectives (as presented on qualtd.net) do not entertain the possibility that DA-RT should be scrapped altogether, whether because of its coercive elements (represented by the JETS statement), its inappropriateness for all forms of research, or its potential unintended consequences. The latter include disincentivizing the generation of original data (Powell et al. Reference Powell2016: ¶5; Htun Reference Htun2016) and a ranking of journals by DA-RT compliance.Footnote ⁵ Because qualitative and interpretive research is more likely than quantitative work to require an archiving exemption due to confidentiality concerns, something recognized by DA-RT proponents and the Ethics Guide, such a ranking would disproportionately impact that research. Moreover, the mere act of requesting an exemption would mark those researchers as other than the norm, and such marking—as linguists who study the subject note—commonly establishes the so-designated as “lesser” (cf. Yashar's Reference Yashar2016 discussion of opting-in versus opting-out).

Second, there is an inherent contradiction between the participatory-deliberative QTD-CTS process now unfolding and its primary objective. Jacobs and Büthe (Reference Jacobs and Büthe2015, 2) describe the process as “[d]ifferentiated, bottom-up articulations of the meaning and practices of research transparency for various forms of qualitative research.”Footnote ⁶ The CTSs' first objective, they write, is to provide “crucial guidance to journal editors and editorial boards … to promote research transparency in a manner consistent with the discipline's intellectual pluralism.” We see a clear tension, however, between this bottom-up process for producing CTSs and their subsequent implementation by editors and other policy enforcers in a top-down fashion. Despite the language of “guidance” and “guidelines” in the QTD proposal, DA-RT's history, the JETS statement in particular, and our knowledge of policy implementation processes leave us less than optimistic that “guidelines” will not become rigidified standards detrimental, ultimately, to disciplinary knowledge.

Such potential rigidity—and this is our third point—instantiates a methodological problem. The CTSs in use could ossify what should be—and are, in peer review and other processes—dynamic, fluid, evolving norms (Schwartz-Shea Reference Schwartz-Shea, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2014). Many social science methodologists hold that standards should be allowed to evolve because research is a historically situated endeavor. The criteria for assessing research quality should, they argue, reflect this situatedness: the meanings of evaluative criteria are “ever subject to constant reinterpretation” as they are applied to concrete studies (Smith and Deemer Reference Smith, Deemer, Denzin and Lincoln2003, 445). Yet while acknowledging that “communities have very different beliefs about what constitutes useful knowledge and how such value is to be obtained,” Lupia and Elman (Reference Lupia and Elman2014, 20) claim that “scholarly communities hold shared and stable beliefs” about the characteristics that research should possess (emphasis added). Such (presumed) stability renders the conceptualization of CTSs ahistorical. It also makes the discussion of research quality too removed from what researchers actually do and the actual problems encountered. Moreover, the Elman and Kapiszewski (Reference Elman and Kapiszewski2014) essay referenced by Lupia and Elman to support their argument is not founded on any of the history or philosophy of science literature—a literature that, from Popper to Kuhn to feminist philosophers such as Sandra Harding, demonstrates that beliefs about science have not at all been stable. The CTS approach is at odds with the history of science: scientific processes are a matter of advancing persuasive arguments that evolve through the give and take of research-community practices, not a matter of making rules that are codified for all time and imposed by fiat.

But the methodological difficulty is not only that—point four. The articulation of community standards presumes unified methods-based communities (within the QTD-CTS parameters); for example, that all ethnographers share the same practice and standards. In reality, however, ethnographers (to keep to that example) are not bound together in that way; nor do they appoint certain practitioners-peers as standard-makers for the rest.Footnote ⁷ Put more pointedly, while epistemic communities can surely be identified, the CTS process tends to reify them. Unlike joining a scholarly association such as APSA, no one signs up and pays dues to epistemic/research communities; instead, these are constituted through citation and peer review practices, and it is the latter that the CTSs risk detracting from as DA-RT is implemented.

Finally, point five, what, precisely, is wrong with continuing to rely on peer review for policing epistemic-community standards? While the peer review process is not without problems or critics, when it functions well, it draws on researchers' expertise. Informing this expertise are evaluative standards that are to some extent codified in methods texts, but practitioners also draw on expert knowledge that is often known tacitly (Polanyi Reference Polanyi1966; Flyvbjerg Reference Flyvbjerg2001; Yanow Reference Yanow, Garud, Simpson, Langley and Tsoukas2015, 277–85; cf. Yashar Reference Yashar2016). It is not self-evident that CTSs will improve on this process; they might even worsen it by encouraging busy reviewers to substitute a “checklist” approach for their situational judgment—as has often happened with contemporary, institutionalized review of research ethics.Footnote ⁸

DA-RT seems, to us, to reinvent a wheel that—from the perspective of interpretive research, at least—was not broken. It requires a huge investment of time and energy that therefore seems unwarranted, at best, and harmful, at worst. It is not as if researchers don't already have venues for discussing these issues—methods courses, for instance, and an extensive methods literature. Additionally, there is a risk that DA-RT enshrines a particular definition of transparency that it then treats as an overarching goal in and of itself, rather than as a means to a greater, epistemological (“knowledge claims”) end: explaining how and why a particular piece of research is trustworthy (see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012, 104 and elsewhere; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2006, xiii). Moreover, we note Mary Hawkesworth's critique (Reference Hawkesworth, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2014, 37, emphasis added) of what we might call “extreme” forms of transparency: “Critical reflection upon … theoretical presuppositions is possible …; but the goal of transparency, of the unmediated grasp of things as they are, is not. For no reflective investigation, no matter how critical, can escape the fundamental conditions of human cognition.” This brings us back to the dearth of reflective engagement with the philosophy of (social) science in DA-RT. We think that researchers would do better to think deeply about such matters, not just consult a brief transparency statement, a condensation that detracts from the complexity of what researchers do and pushes researchers to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing an implied “compliance” goal (again, parallel with IRB protocols).

ON DA-RT PURPOSES AND APSA GOVERNANCE: CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

DA-RT and the CTS process position all of us through their rhetoric (something Jeffrey Isaac [Reference Isaac2015b, Reference Isaacc; Reference Isaac2016] has also noted in his essays): by implication, current research must, ipso facto, be problematic. Consider this passage:

Although we have not undertaken a systematic assessment of this assertion, our own reading leads us to challenge its claims. For examples, we would point, in no particular order, to Sarah Parkinson's Reference Parkinson2013 APSR article, which provides extensive information about her research process and addresses why she could not, ethically, say more than she does about the identities of the people she interacted with, let alone file her interview transcripts for public review. Timothy Pachirat's Reference Pachirat2011 book also includes extensive information about his research setting and how he “accessed” it. And Samer Shehata's work (Reference Shehata2009; Reference Shehata, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2014) is highly reflective—“transparent”—about the aspects of his own background that shaped the knowledge claims he could advance and those he could not. Perhaps the quoted passage is applicable to studies using process tracing (the authors' extended example), but it does not follow that the problem holds for all qualitative-interpretive research in political science. Indeed, these three examples and many, many others refute the claim that “most” such research fails in this fashion. And as Yashar (Reference Yashar2016) points out, these matters are precisely what reviewers (and editors) read for. Additionally, for those whose work already entails reflexivity as the key means of enacting transparency, this concern is misplaced.

Those of us who study policy analysis know that policies as implemented often do not match policymakers' intentions and that policy solutions do not always match policy problems. Analyzing this mismatch, policy framing analysis shifts the focus from the character of the programmatic solution to definitional perceptions of the problem. Applied here, it asks a question several have raised: what problem is DA-RT intended to solve? We miss this reflective questioning in this process backed up by evidence. DA-RT appears, then, to be a response to a manufactured crisis, without systematic evidence for how it is going to solve the problems of either the public legitimacy of political science or the internal disciplinary legitimacy of qualitative methods.

DA-RT proponents have failed to do the most basic policy analysis, too, in attending primarily to benefits (e.g., “DA-RT Workshop Held in Washington, DC” 2015 Footnote ⁹ ) while treating costs only superficially (Lupia and Elman Reference Lupia and Elman2014, 23; Elman and Kapiszewski Reference Elman and Kapiszewski2014, 43), a point that Hall, Htun, Lynch, Sil and Castro, and Yashar (all 2016) also engage. A serious cost-benefit assessment would inquire into the distributions of those costs and their effects. Would the burdens of DA-RT affect some forms of research more than others? Would faculty at resource-rich institutions be advantaged over those at poorer ones? Would doctoral students and untenured faculty bear more of these costs than tenured faculty? These are reasonable, ethical questions that deserved in-depth consideration before Council's adoption of DA-RT into the Ethics Guide.

Our concern, then, is that despite its initial structure and the best efforts of those involved, the CTS process is, at best, an incomplete conversation, doing particular kinds of political work. It lays the groundwork for creating methodological standards to be imposed—even if the formal discourse is less direct, as in the idea that CTSs offer “guidance” (Qualitative Transparency Deliberations n.d., 3, ¶2). But that guidance is intended for editors, whereas it is authors who experience DA-RT as an imposition, much as other contemporary systems, influenced by New Public Management ideas, increasingly constrain researcher autonomy to make judgments concerning the specifics of their own research projects (e.g., IRBs). The notion that DA-RT does not change editors' longstanding practices (Elman and Lupia Reference Elman and Lupia2016, 47) belies the changes that may well occur in journal and disciplinary landscapes as JETS is implemented.

Along with Htun (Reference Htun2016) and Yashar (Reference Yashar2016), we would rather put our service energies into those aspects of professional practice that include direct engagement with the issues DA-RT is raising, in conversations with students and colleagues. That is, without DA-RT we would still be conversing, teaching, and writing peer reviews as we had before it came along, but in ways that befit a particular piece of research and particular epistemic community standards. Moreover, along with Fujii (Reference Fujii2016), we find DA-RT distracting attention from more pressing political issues—both disciplinary and societal—that have real impacts every day and that deserve attention and time.

To return to the question with which we began, how have we arrived at this moment? A crucial part of understanding DA-RT concerns its relationship to APSA—“the leading professional organization for the study of political science … serv[ing] more than 13,000 members in more than 80 countries” (APSA 2016). But what is the governance character of that organization? One vision is that APSA is a service organization (as opposed to, for example, a community of scholars) providing benefits that exceed costs. This is a “club” public goods kind of vision: people pay dues so that together they can garner collective goods they could not get as individuals. It is based on (enlightened) shared interest. This is a limited sense of community; but those limits work when the organization focuses primarily on benefits.

With DA-RT, APSA crossed the line from being a service organization providing benefits to being an advocacy organization, promoting a policy that, in the end, is intended to coerce certain kinds of behavior relating to the core raison d’être of a portion of that “community”: the ability to do research and “contribute to knowledge.” Coercion is the classic case requiring an organization's members to legitimate its actions (e.g., no taxation without representation). When the organization acts in ways that members understand as coercive or as having coercive effects, then its legitimacy should be questioned. Here, as DA-RT and the QTD-CTS process are activities of an APSA Organized Section, those activities become understood, ipso facto, as APSA activities—especially in light of words and acts such as those detailed above—and it is, then, reasonable to question them as well.

The legitimacy question becomes especially relevant with respect to the “private” (Lynch Reference Lynch2016, 39) 2014 Workshop that produced the JETS statement. It drew on the Council-approved changes to the Ethics Guidelines in bringing together a select set of people and achieving consensus among a small editorial group, leading to JETS. Although APSA was identified as a “convener” when the Workshop statement was first published, that relationship was disappeared from the official “JETS statement.” In “A Response to Discussions and Debates at the 2015 APSA Meeting,” Elman, Kapiszewski, and Lupia (Reference Elman, Kapiszewski and Lupia2015) state that the APSA Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science is “the only official American Political Science Association policy on DA-RT.” They note, contra the 2014 Workshop statement, that its cosponsors were Syracuse University and the University of Michigan, not APSA, but that, as APSA sent staff-members “[a]t its own expense,” thereby enabling “us to expand the set of invitees given our very limited budget, they [APSA] were listed as a cosponsor.”

Yet it appears that the editors attending the Workshop understood it to be convened by APSA, thereby adding the Association's imprimatur to their actions in signing the statement. The recent efforts to correct the record concerning APSA's sponsorship might be read as recognition that APSA's sponsorship role, beyond that Workshop, has been understood by some members as, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, coercive. What is clear in the history is that APSA has played a supportive role in the events leading up to JETS, and since. Understanding that role goes a long way to clarifying some of DA-RT's reception.

Unlike other social science organizations (e.g., the American Economic Association), APSA does not have the kind of democratic process that involves regular competitive elections for its leadership positions. This makes APSA a “weak” democracy at best, according to the yardstick commonly used by political scientists studying the meaning of democracy, who treat competitive elections as a minimal criterion for assessing whether any particular country warrants the democracy label. Such weakness may not be particularly worrisome when APSA limits itself to a service-providing role (e.g., organizing annual meetings). But in going beyond that role, APSA opened itself up to questioning concerning the legitimacy basis for its actions, beginning with the 2012 Council vote to include DA-RT in the Ethics Guidelines which set the stage for all that has ensued; and its less than robust democratic character becomes crucial for grasping resistance to DA-RT. This is also what leads to our concern for the representational character of what will be the ultimate “community” statements. Would Council officers and members elected through competitive elections have been more inquisitive about and critical of DA-RT—a policy that potentially impacts large swaths of members and nonmembers—at its inception? Would they have inquired more closely into the 2012 changes to the Ethics Guide or pushed for systematic study of the problem(s) DA-RT was intended to solve? Would they have rejected then-executive director Michael Brintnall's suggestion, insisting that consultation with the membership occur before the Council vote to change the Ethics Guide, thereby front-ending the participatory deliberation that is now unfolding? We cannot know what might have been, but we think an electoral system based on constituent representation might have affected Council members' deliberations (e.g., in their anticipation of others' reactions to their Ethics Guidelines decisions and of being held to account).

We have tried not to create a “strawman” version of DA-RT/QTD/CTS (Elman and Lupia Reference Elman and Lupia2016, 45), but to suggest how texts (including Council minutes) and acts (panels that ignore critical voices, APSA's featuring DA-RT on its homepage without mentioning the contestation and dissent) have gone a long way toward creating an environment hostile to the very dialogue that QMMR is now promoting. What is being communicated is distrust on the part of one colleague in another, and we sincerely regret this state of affairs. Still, those most disempowered by DA-RT are new generations of scholars. As one graduate student, “Tim” (2015), put it in a comment on the Duck of Minerva blog: