Data, transparency, and political theory

Abstract

In the various conversations, deliberations, postings, panels, and forums in which I have participated, I confess that I often have felt like Admiral James Stockdale, who ran for Vice President on Ross Perot's independent ticket in 1992. In the vice-presidential debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle, he began his opening remarks with the questions: "Who am I? And why am I here?" Less metaphorically, the question I must confront is: What is a political theorist doing in these deliberations over Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT)? What does DA-RT have to do with political theory? We may recall that Admiral Stockdale's question, profound in its existential implications, and elegant in its practical simplicity, was responded to with laughter and turned into a joke, as Stockdale was read as a nice, but confused, old man. He was considered irrelevant to the election. Political theory, similarly, has been sidelined, dismissed, as irrelevant to this discussion, indeed, perhaps to the entire discipline, because we don't deal with "data." We may be nice colleagues, and some colleagues may begrudgingly acknowledge that perhaps political theory needs to be taught to our students, but we are often not seen as serious participants in the conversation called political science, and that has extended to the DA-RT debates.