Replication Data for "Scholarship on the Middle East in Political Science and International Relations – A Reassessment"

A recently-published dataset of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) focused scholarship in journals selected to represent Political Science’s disciplinary ‘core’ sheds empirical light on key publishing trends, from the balance between quantitative and qualitative studies to the growth in experimental and ‘large-n’ statistical methods. Cammett and Kendall’s (2021) analysis shows that between 2001 and 2019 MENA-focused work declined as a share of publications, but that just under half of that work is qualitative. However, the definition of qualitative research the study uses significantly understates the number of such scholarship in the CK dataset. Our analysis rectifies this, distinguishing between research using qualitative evidence, qualitative methods, theoretical traditions, and paradigms (positivist/post-positivist). This yields a more accurate and altogether starker picture of MENA qualitative research’s marginality in ‘core’ Politics journals. These results raise the question of why methodologically sophisticated scholarship outside ‘top journals’ has not been published there.

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