Abstract
ABSTRACTPolitical scientists are increasingly using digitized documents from archives. This article is a practical introduction to doing digital archival research. First, it explains when and why political scientists use evidence from archival research. Second, it argues that the remote accessibility of digitized records provides new opportunities for comparative and transnational research. However, digital archival research also risks aggravating five types of biases that pose challenges for qualitative, quantitative, interpretive, and mixed-methods research:survival,transfer,digitization, andreinforcement biasat the level of record collection andsource biasat the level of record creation. Third, this article offers concrete strategies for anticipating and mitigating these biases by walking readers through the experience of entering, being in, and leaving an archive, while also underscoring the importance of learning the structure of an archive. The article concludes by addressing the ethical implications to archival research as a type of field research for political scientists.
Highlights
A mong political scientists, the practice of using digitized documents from archives has become increasingly common
This article is a practical introduction to doing digital archival research
It explains when and why political scientists use evidence based on archival research
Summary
For empirically oriented subfields, “doing archival research” often means collecting data from historical records for a quantitative or a mixed-methods approach to causal inference or primary sources for qualitative case studies aimed at theory testing (American Political Science Association 2019, 2021). Political scientists do archival research to gather original evidence for descriptive inference, case studies for theory building, and interpretive analyses of causal processes and concept histories. A turn to archives coincides with a distinctive turn to history in political science (American Political Science Association 2019; Mahoney and Thelen 2015) For those studying the long-run consequences of institutions or events, archival records can yield granular time-series data amenable to rigorous quantitative causal analyses that are descriptively valuable for identifying empirically puzzling or theoretically surprising patterns (Guardado 2018; Suryanarayan and White 2021). At the level of record creation, digital archival research faces greater risks of source bias, which reflects the extent to which governments and the powerful tend to be those who write records in the first place..
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