Project Overview
The data in this file is related to "Muscle Matters: An Integrationist Turn in Transatlantic Finance.” The starting point of this research project was a desire to explain the main financial regulatory patterns of the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), the two jurisdictions most responsible for setting global trends in the domain. However, since those patterns were not obvious in either the qualitative literature or commonly used indexes, a preliminary step was to create data of our own, usable for the purposes of “Muscle Matters: An Integrationist Turn in Transatlantic Finance,” a previously published article (“Financial Regulatory Conundrums in the North Atlantic,” European Journal of Political Research 63, 2[May 2024]: 682-704) and, we hope, further studies.
This part of the project forced us to confront a tension in our ambitions. On the one hand, we strove to preserve the benefits of qualitative research (e.g. high levels of confidence in the findings because of scholars’ detailed and nuanced knowledge of relatively few and carefully selected “thick” as opposed to “thin” cases). On the other hand, to find meaningful empirical patterns across cases and over time, so as to accumulate knowledge, we decided to include more cases than is typical in qualitative research on the politics of finance. Thus, we not only had to create new data, but also devise ways to be systematic in our classification and analysis of multiple cases. Moreover, in addition to wanting to resolve this classic tension between confidence and generalizability, we aimed to do so while meeting the discipline’s rising expectations concerning research transparency as well as our own related commitment to being reflective and explicit about the role of interpretation, judgment and positionality in the making of our data. To manage these multiple goals, we created a package of protocols and techniques and provided public access to our data (herein stored).
Data and Data Collection Overview
In preparing the data, our approach was for the authors to code data points independently, then to compare assessments, arguing back and forth to come to an agreement. For each data point, we include short narrative explanations containing the evidence and reasoning for why we coded it the way we did. Hence, we did not opt for a division of labour, rather we hashed it out in each instance, harnessing our combined expertise and using the “control” of argumentation.
Finally, and importantly, whenever possible, we used the findings of the enormous store of existing qualitative research as raw material for creating these data. The qualitative literature on financial regulation flourished before and after the 2008 international financial crisis. Despite the subfield’s richness, there is not enough knowledge accumulation. In this sense, the creation of our data on the levels of financial regulatory integrationism in the US and the EU is, in part, an effort to address the aggregation problem. In constructing our datasets, we reviewed a vast amount of works in political science, political economy, legal studies, and economic sociology, focusing on the research dealing with the 11 financial regulatory areas we cover. Where existing published research was not sufficient, we filled the gaps with official documentation, including laws, articles from the financial press, and other original material.
Creating these data was an effort to aggregate empirical findings from qualitative research on the politics of financial regulation, though other documentary sources were also used. Readers will find data points for US and EU financial regulation at two moments in time (2014 and 2020) in 11 financial regulatory subsectors. For each data point, there is a narrative describing the coding decision. The file also includes notes on the data-creation process, conceptualization of the categories and coding.
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
The data file shared here as “Posner-Quaglia_Dataset_Integrationism_202503.pdf” contains data on US and EU financial regulatory integrationism for the period following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis to 2020. The data file contains three main components: Levels of Financial Regulatory Integrationism, Notes on the Data and Data-Creation Process, and a Summary of Coded Data, and Narrative Explanations for Coding Decisions. Similarly, there are two tables: one that explains the conceptualization and general coding guidelines for integrationist regulation, and another that summarizes the coded data, specifically the eleven areas of US and EU financial regulation, categorized by level of integrationism for 2014 and 2020.
The documentation files shared consist of this Data Narrative and an administrative README file. |
