Chapter 3 guides the reader inside parties by examining how candidate nominations, leadership selection, and policy platforms operate in modern democracies around the world. Kernell examines variation among these rules both within and across countries, as well as over time, and proposes a coding methodology for defining the degree of membership influence in each of the three primary dimensions. The chapter also discusses case selection and data collection.

While the role of judges has changed dramatically due to the vanishing trial phenomenon, the change has generally slipped under the radar. The extent and nature of the transformation of judicial roles usually cannot be deduced from reading legislation or official public legal records. This stands in stark contrast to the information age, in which a wealth of public information and a forthcoming attitude toward supplying additional information might be hoped for. In this chapter, we describe the transparency problem and our efforts to persuade courts to divulge information. Notable, this problem, which confronted us as researchers, is compounded in the case of individual litigants who have fewer means to surmount it. We describe the methodological approach that developed in the course of our research to surmount the data challenge. We show the strengths and weaknesses of each research method that we used and the way in which combined research methods have an added value, compensating for weaknesses and uncovering blind spots. By conducting court observations, coding actual court files, and analyzing them quantitatively, while interviewing judges and other legal actors, we were able to obtain a rich picture of the trajectory of cases as they move toward settlement.

In Chapter 3 we discuss the pitfall of following an ethnocentric view in the study of politically relevant data. We argue that it is not fruitful either to associate a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area, or to attribute a political notion or an actor with a positive or negative value. Here we critically consider the universal validity of notions such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, which may appear at first as clearly positive or negative and as such non-controversial from a Western viewpoint. We will refer to cases in which members of non-Western linguacultures conventionally interpret these notions differently from how they are conventionally seen in the West and how they are often used in academic inquiries in a seemingly ‘neutral’ way. We argue that it is ethnocentric to dismiss linguaculturally embedded standard interpretations of such notions as ‘undemocratic’, ‘unenlightened’ and ‘autocratic’ because through such a dismissive attitude one is led to automatically associating a particular positive or negative value with a particular country or area.

Arnold Schrier’s study, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (1958) set out to analyse the impact of mass emigration to America on the country of origin. Schrier collaborated with the Irish Folklore Commission to devise a questionnaire to gather data on the cultural and folkloristic reaction to emigration. While conducted in 1955, most of those interviewed were in their seventies and eighties and could provide memories and reflections on emigration and returned migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questionnaire is a significant source for those desiring to learn more about Ireland and America and possible Americanising influences. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the questionnaire and the data which emerged from it. Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh notes the nuanced attitudes towards the returned migrant evident in the survey responses, beyond the stereotype of the ‘show off’ returned Yank. Mac Cárthaigh concludes that the disruptive figure of the returned Yank highlighted the gap between the opportunity and novel experiences represented by emigration and the conservatism of the society left behind.

This chapter begins the second part of the book, which tests the main empirical implications of localized peace enforcement theory using data from Mali, a land-locked country in West Africa. Though Mali experienced three coups, a separatist civil war, and an Islamist extremist insurgency from 2012 to 2024, no source of conflict has been more fatal or detrimental to Malian society than communal violence. The chapter starts by providing a very brief history of identity-based conflict in the country. It also places Mali within a broader historical context and demonstrates that its experience of interethnic tensions is representative of countries with colonial legacies. The chapter then draws on detailed interviews with forty-eight local leaders to describe what communal violence and peacekeeping look like in Mali from the residents’ perspective. Given the theoretical importance domestic perceptions of peacekeepers, these interviews offer crucial insights into the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory. There are distinct advantages of studying the Malian case, which the chapter describes in a brief overview of international interventions by the UN and France from 2012 to 2024.

This chapter examines Kenya's use of debt-based financial statecraft, revealing an uneven track record. It first describes how the Kenyan government diversified its portfolio of external finance with both international bonds and Chinese loans. Drawing on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter then shows Kenya's mixed success in extracting bargaining leverage from its new sources of finance. While the Kenyan government achieved increased flexibility from donors on governance issues, it encountered greater resistance on financial management practices. The chapter highlights that donors' strategic interests in their relationship with Kenya encouraged them to be more flexible when Kenya diversified its portfolio of external finance, but that their concerns about accountability and use of funds led them to be more stringent on issues of financial management.

This chapter considers Ghana's use of debt-based financial statecraft, describing the country's early embrace Chinese loans and substantial borrowing in international bond markets. Despite diversifying its sources of external finance, the government had limited success leveraging its reduced reliance on traditional donor funds in aid negotiations. Based on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter demonstrates that, while the Ghanaian government initially secured some negotiation wins, it ultimately struggled to achieve its preferred outcomes with donors on either economic policy or financial management. The chapter attributes these difficulties to donors' diminished perception of Ghana's significance and a lack of donor trust, underscoring the complexities of using alternative finance as leverage in aid negotiations.

This chapter focuses on the Ethiopian government's successful use of debt-based financial statecraft. It examines Ethiopia's shift from heavy reliance on traditional donor aid to borrowing from Chinese lenders and issuing a debut international bond. Using interviews with government and donor officials, it highlights how this diversification of external finance allowed the Ethiopian government to obtain more favorable terms in aid agreements, including lenience from donors on governance issues, flexibility on economic monitoring, and donor support for the government's state-led approach to development. When Ethiopia's financing options later narrowed, the government's bargaining leverage with donors declined, further corroborating the role of alternative finance in aid negotiations. The chapter underscores the importance of donors' perceptions of Ethiopia's strategic value and donors' trust in the government for their willingness to accommodate the Ethiopian government's preferences.

This chapter describes the book's case study approach, which compares Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya. All three countries experienced the regional trend of increased borrowing from China and in international bond markets in the 2000s. However, the countries vary in strategic significance and donor trust, allowing for tests of heterogeneity in the financial statecraft of borrowers. The chapter discusses the data collection process for the case studies, with over 170 elite interviews, mostly with government and donor officials participating in aid negotiations, and how this data is used to trace debt-based financial statecraft in each country. The chapter briefly provides background on each country's political and economic context and previews findings on how their external finance portfolios impacted aid negotiations with traditional donors.

I consider how Gulf Arabs evaluate their government’s behavior relative to the circulation of wealth. On the basis of roughly 350 interviews in the four countries with scholars, economists, dissidents, bankers, members of government, representatives of public and private foundations and NGOs and official and independent ‘ulama, I summarize their views, quoting from their responses to a set of questions and sharing the evidence they provide. I note the extent to which my interlocutors criticize their rulers in ethical terms, especially insofar as their commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion is concerned. In short, they confirm that there is no genuine concern for equity in the distribution of resources, and no indication that religious norms are integrated into this domain of governance. Rather, fairly narrow political and material interests prevail. Then, I briefly describe episodes of resistance to Gulf rulers from religious forces in society. The aim is twofold: to demonstrate how they too instrumentalize Islam for political capital and how rulers respond to the challenge they face from the religious field.

This chapter presents an overview of methods used in clinical assessment, classification, and diagnosis. After outlining the range of assessment options available to clinicians, it describes the typical goals of assessment, including diagnosis, description, treatment planning, and prediction. It also introduces some of the most important variables that affect a clinician’s choices about how to conduct an assessment, including its purpose, the clinician’s theoretical views, the psychometric properties of available assessment instruments, and other contextual factors. The chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of human clinical judgment when compared to AI and other actuarial procedures, focusing especially on the errors that clinicians tend to make but strive to avoid. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the results of clinical assessments are communicated to clients and third parties, and the factors and formats associated with assessment reports.

Chapter 4 focuses on illustrating and testing the microlevel pathways that I detail in Chapter 3. I present in-depth interview data with thirty-four Brazilians, which generates the hypothesis and illustrates how exactly education impacts political identity and racial subjectivity. I present firsthand accounts of each pathway of exposure (information, social networks, and the labor market), and show how subjective personal experiences altered racial subjectivities and racialized understandings of power relationships. After illustrating the plausibility of these pathways, I draw on survey data from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to systematically test the mechanisms uncovered through inductive research. My analysis shows that the direction of the relationship between education and identification indeed changed over time as public education became more inclusive, and that education correlates positively with racial consciousness and black identification by the 2000s.

The chapter provides testimonies of individuals who took part in a genocidal process in order to understand how mass atrocities can take shape across different human societies. Through the analyses of interviews conducted with former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda and in Cambodia, it appears that many of them reported that they participated because they simply followed orders. It thus suggests that obedience to orders strongly influences individual actions during a war or a genocide. The chapter also highlights the key role of other forms of social influence, such as conformity to a group and compliance. However, the interviews reveal that complex additional factors have influenced former perpetrators in their actions, such as elements of coercion, the fear for one’s own life, and hateful propaganda. This chapter illuminatesthe many reasons that can lead a human to perpetrate evil acts.

In working with network data, data acquisition is often the most basic yet the most important and challenging step. The availability of data and norms around data vary drastically across different areas and types of research. A team of biologists may spend more than a decade running assays to gather a cells interactome; another team of biologists may only analyze publicly available data. A social scientist may spend years conducting surveys of underrepresented groups. A computational social scientist may examine the entire network of Facebook. An economist may comb through large financial documents to gather tables of data on stakes in corporate holdings. In this chapter, we move one step along the network study life-cycle. Key to data gathering is good record-keeping and data provenance. Good data gathering sets us up for future success—otherwise, garbage in, garbage out—making it critical to ensure the best quality and most appropriate data is used to power your investigation.