Data for: Financial Regulatory Conundrums in the North Atlantic

Résumé 0

Project Overview The data in these three files are related to "Financial Regulatory Conundrums in the North Atlantic." 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 “Financial Regulatory Conundrums” and, we hope, for 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 a long span of years, 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 – including the use of a research appendix (which includes an elaborated version of this project summary with references) and public access to our data (herein stored). 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 financial stringency and border-policing capacities 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. In all, we used more than 120 articles, books and working papers. 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. Data Overview “Posner-Quaglia_Dataset_Stringency_202306.pdf” contains data on financial regulatory stringency for the US and EU, 2000-2020. 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 four moments in time (2000, 2007, 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. “Posner-Quaglia_Dataset_BorderPolicingCapacities_202306.pdf” contains data on border-policing capacity in the financial sector for the US and EU, before and after the 2008 crisis. Creating these data was again an effort to aggregate empirical findings from qualitative research. The underlying empirical material also includes legislation and other documents. Readers will find data points coded as “yes,” “no” or “in part” for US and EU for two periods (2000-2007 and 2008-2020) 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 border-policing capacity and coding. “Posner-Quaglia_PublicSalienceFinReg_202306.pdf” contains visuals illustrating data on the public salience of financial regulation. "Financial Regulatory Conundrums of the North Atlantic" refers to these data to evaluate an alternative explanation to the one we put forth. The visuals, generated by Google Trend and based on Google Searches, cover the years 2008-2022 for the US, the UK, France and Germany.