Collaborative Research: Extending a Multi-Country Database and Program of Research

该项目的四位合作主要研究者（Stacia L. Haynie、Reginald S. Sheehan、Donald R. Songer和C. Neal Tate）将继续并扩大他们的努力，为公众开发一个系统的、可复制的数据库，以支持对法院、法官及其行为的比较分析。为了进一步实现这一目标，主要研究人员将在国家科学基金奖（9975180,9975237,9975315,9975323）的支持下扩展和扩展他们正在创建的多国数据库。该数据库支持整个学术界关于法院和法官及其跨越若干国家/文化界限的职能和行为的描述性和理论性研究。它还允许主要研究人员追求一个初步的研究议程，突出实质性领域，可以在许多国家和许多次进行富有成效的研究。这个数据库的发展基于一个中心命题：理论和数据是密切相关的。随着新数据的出现，新的理论和假设被创造和检验。对于世界上绝大多数法院，社会科学家甚至缺乏最基本的描述性数据来总结其制度特征、历史发展、功能过程或制度和个人行为。只要有这些简单的描述性数据，学者们就可以回答许多理论上有趣的问题。根据之前的奖项编制的数据库显示，即使对这些数据进行简单的分析，也能提供令人印象深刻的答案，比如“最高法院是做什么的？”以及“政党能力理论有多普遍？”最初的项目包含了一个样本，在15年的时间里，在八个拥有英美法律体系的样本国家中，每年报告100个最高法院的判决（或宇宙，以较小的为准）。主要研究人员将扩大数据库的时间覆盖范围，以包括最近34年的可用数据，并通过增加一个重要的不使用英语的民法法院，即墨西哥国家最高法院，扩大数据库的国家和文化覆盖范围。

The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards (9975180, 9975237, 9975315, 9975323). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national/cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world's courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as "What Do Supreme Courts Do?" and how general is "Party Capability Theory?" The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico.