Data, Archival

Access to Materials

Because modern governments and most nongovernmental organizations usually produce a written record of their activity, the variety of archival data and the purposes for which researchers use such data are too numerous to count. Probably the most common objective in academic research on politics has been to analyze high-level government decisions, especially foreign policy decisions. Archived records are often the most important sources of information about these decisions, and sometimes the only one. Even though attempts to perform process tracing on policy decisions can also use interviews or oral histories, analyses of open governmental and nongovernmental sources, statistical analyses of observable actions, and findings from other published research, access to even a small portion of the internal records often provides information not available by other means, and the opening of formerly secret records often leads to significant changes in how decisions are understood.

Researchers who use archival data generally do not regard them as offering an unbiased and complete account of events. Most governments do not operate under laws that establish a presumption of public access to government records. They almost always restrict access to much of their records, especially when they have been recently created, relate to foreign policy, or are politically sensitive for some reason. Although in some countries the law provides that citizens have certain legal rights to government information and can request the release of restricted material, governments can implement these laws in ways that partially nullify their effect by allowing long delays, imposing large fees for search and document production, construing search requests as narrowly as possible, and sometimes simply ignoring their legal obligations. Although determined petitioners with the requisite money, time, or political influence can sometimes overturn these restrictions, they can frustrate some researchers and discourage others. Even when they make available a large portion of their records on a subject, governments often hold back material when its release is deemed to have significant negative political consequences. Governments also [Page 516]destroy a substantial share of the documents they create, and they often redact portions of documents that they release to the public. They might alter their policies on the release of restricted material in response to current political events, in some cases actually reimposing restrictions on material that formerly had been available (this has happened in both the United States and the Russian Federation).

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