The Vanishing Lists: Collecting and Matching Parliamentary Candidate Data in Romania
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Date
2016
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The Ohio State University Libraries in partnership with IFiS Publishers
Abstract
Publishing and preserving detailed information about candidates running for public offi ce
is a form of accountability and a precondition for the production of reliable academic
knowledge about electoral and partisan politics. This article offers a guide to researchers
interested in collecting candidate data in environments where both politicians who design
and civil servants who administer the electoral process have a limited understanding of
the relevance of such data and where their bureaucratic capacity is underdeveloped. It
does so by focusing on the case of Romania, where no complete registry of candidatures
at parliamentary elections exists and key information about the candidates running in the
1990–2000 elections seems to have been lost forever. We employ process tracing and
an in-depth analysis of legal documents to reveal the causes of this outcome. The article
describes how a team of researchers devised and implemented several research strategies
to cope with scarce data, the various types of logistical or methodological obstacles
encountered and the solutions used in order to recover data and build a new, matched
dataset of Romanian parliamentary candidates.
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Citation
Ask: Research and Methods. Volume 25, Issue 1 (2016), pp. 61-76