The Argentine Supreme Court in press, 1995-1999

Project Summary: The book that motivated and then drew on part of this data collection, High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2012), analyzes the strikingly different patterns of inter-branch interaction over economic governance that emerged in Argentina and Brazil during the two decades following regime transition. It advances an institutional account of that variation: the Court character thesis. Drawing on both rational choice and historical institutionalism, the author argues that a high court’s character shapes the way that it decides cases of crucial political significance and conditions the way elected leaders respond to its rulings, channeling inter-branch interactions into relatively enduring patterns. The book is grounded in a rich collection of empirical evidence gathered during 20 months of field research in Argentina and Brazil (2004-2005). The author conducted approximately 275 interviews in Spanish and Portuguese, including with more than 20 current and former high court justices; assembled a searchable electronic archive of 14,000 newspaper articles concerning the two high courts and their rulings; collected many types of primary data (e.g., public opinion data, high court opinions, etc.); and directly observed sessions of the Brazilian high court. The data project, assembled with the help of an extraordinary research assistant at UC Irvine, consists of a spreadsheet listing 2,037 newspaper articles concerning the Argentine Supreme Court that appeared in the Argentine daily La Nacion during President Carlos Menem’s second term in office (1995-1999), an increasingly tumultuous time for Argentina and the court. While covering a shorter time period than the book, the data project covers more ground substantively, as it includes (1) every article that focused on a politically important case (in any policy area) before the Argentine Supreme Court, a ruling of the Court on such a case, or the aftermath of one of the Court’s rulings on such a case (these cases were systematically selected employing a methodology specifically designed for the project), (2) every other article regarding the court deemed relevant to understanding high court politics in Argentina during the time period under study. Data Abstract: In the research project to which this data collection is attached, one way of measuring the political salience of cases considered by the Argentine high court between 1984 and 2003 was to count the number of mentions in a major national newspaper (in the case of Argentina, La Nacion). (The other two indicators were mentions in scholarly sources, and mentions in 25 semi-structured interviews.) The articles thus needed to be selected very carefully. In Argentina, with the help of two RAs, the author developed a systematic methodology for selecting and capturing (via digital camera) relevant articles. She worked with the RAs until she and they could read every page of every section of every issue of an entire month of the newspaper, independently of each other, and select the same articles 80% of the time. Almost immediately, the author and her RAs realized that they were missing a lot of information by only selecting articles focused on a particular Argentine Supreme Court case. So, they created a parallel system (and another form) so that they could also take a digital picture of and capture bibliographic information for all of the non-case-related articles (“relevantes”). The centerpiece of the data project is the Excel spreadsheet listing 2,037 newspaper articles concerning the Argentine Supreme Court that appeared in the Argentine daily La Nacion between 1995 and 1999. The spreadsheet has 10 columns, including (A) the code the author assigned to the article; (B/D) the title; (C) whether the article was a sub-article of a larger article; (E/F) author; (G) date of article; (H) name of the case on which the article focused (if any); and (I/J) the URL (available on La Nacion’s web site for all articles beginning in 1996). Files Description: The data project consists of six files (all written in Spanish with the exception of the labeling on the spreadsheet): (1) The spreadsheet described above (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.CLEANED); (2/3) Two Word documents in which the Court cases covered in articles appearing in La Nacion between 1995 and 1999 are listed in chronological order, together with the codes for all of the newspaper articles (identified by their form number) that were associated with each case (all of which are included in the spreadsheet); there are many more articles listed in the spreadsheet than are listed in these Word documents because the spreadsheet also contains all of the articles the research team deemed to be “relevantes” (described above) (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Cases 1995-1997; Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Cases 1998-1999); (4) Sample Newspaper Form – the form that the author’s RAs filled out in Argentina as they systematically selected newspaper articles to include in the sample; each article has one accompanying form; scanning of these for each article included in the spreadsheet is in course (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Sample Newspaper Form); (5) Sample photo – the author and a team of RAs took a digital picture of every newspaper article listed in the spreadsheet; the author is preparing for posting to QDR a digital image of the articles in the spreadsheet for which URLs are missing (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Sample photo); (6) A description (in the form of instructions for RAs) of the methodology RAs used to select the newspaper articles in the spreadsheet (Kapiszewski.Arg SC in Press.2014.01.20.Selection Methodology)