Data for: Muscle Matters: An Integrationist Turn in Transatlantic Finance

<h3>Project Overview</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>