This chapter outlines the empirical strategy for studying policy triage, which occurs when limited administrative resources and growing policy stocks force agencies to prioritize certain implementation tasks over others. To measure policy triage, the analysis distinguishes between triage frequency and intensity. These dimensions together provide a nuanced assessment of overall implementation performance. The chapter also details the theoretical predictors of policy triage: whether central policymakers can shift blame for failures, whether implementing agencies can mobilize external resources, and whether they are internally committed to achieving policy goals despite resource constraints. To test these claims, the research design focuses on two policy areas — environmental and social policy — across six countries representing diverse administrative traditions. Data collection involves secondary document analysis and 157 expert interviews with implementation officials. By systematically capturing both formal and informal organizational practices, this methodology reveals the complex trade-offs inherent in modern public administration and underscores how different political and organizational conditions jointly shape policy triage.

In this chapter, we define our key concepts (e.g., interstate crisis and major-state war), justify our case selection strategy, establish and explain our methodological approach (i.e., the logic of discovery), and outline the conceptual/theoretical framework that guides our analysis of each crisis case. The framework involves a set of variables that commonly appear in studies of international conflict. We therefore introduce these variables, organize them, and explain the questions through which we look for their influence on crisis (de-)escalation in each case.

This chapter introduces the book by presenting the main puzzle motivating it – variation in deference. It suggests that international courts defer to varying degrees and through different modes. This chapter presents the book’s conceptual approach to studying deference and the core theoretical argument advanced by the book. In doing so, it distinguished the conceptual and theoretical framework from existing literature on international courts. It describes the research design that guides the empirical analysis and the logic behind the book’s focus on the East African Court of Justice, Caribbean Court of Justice, and the African Court of Human Rights. The chapter briefly summarizes the main findings and the implications of the book for future research.

What do you do with your data once you have collected it? This chapter will elucidate the procedures for judicious handling of a large body of natural speech materials, such as audio files, interview reports, and consent forms.

Early CALL researchers focused primarily on the technical aspects of language learning, such as computer program design and the use of multimedia. However, over time the field has evolved to encompass a wider range of pedagogical and psychological considerations. For example, researchers have investigated the efficacy of different teaching approaches, such as task-based language learning and communicative language teaching through technology. They have also explored the role of learner motivation in technology-mediated language learning, as well as the impact of technology on learners’ attitudes toward language learning. In terms of research design and settings, CALL studies have become increasingly diverse. While early studies often relied on small-scale, laboratory-based experiments, more recent research has taken place in real-world educational settings, such as classrooms and online learning environments using a wider range of research methods, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Overall, while there have been significant developments in CALL research over the past four decades, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. As technology continues to evolve, it is likely that researchers will continue to explore new avenues for integrating technology into language education and addressing the challenges that arise along the way.

Chapter 2 presents the bounded accountability theory of incumbency bias and its main empirical predictions and outlines the core empirical strategy for testing the theory across the country–office cases. After offering a conceptualization and typology of incumbency bias, the chapter explains how the nature of the information environment encourages retrospective voting and leads to the emergence of incumbency bias. Based on this general mechanism, the chapter predicts that the alignment of policy scope and fiscal institutions explains why some democracies exhibit incumbency advantage while others display an incumbency disadvantage, and demonstrates how exogenous shocks may lead to within-country changes in incumbency bias. The chapter also derives predictions about why there are differences between personal and party incumbency bias. It concludes by developing a novel estimation framework that extends the close-election regression discontinuity design to measure incumbency bias in different political systems and document variation in direction and type within them.

This chapter motivates the book’s central questions: Why is incumbency an electoral blessing for politicians in some countries but an electoral curse in others? Why does incumbency bias emerge? What are the consequences of incumbency bias for democracy? The chapter then presents the book’s bounded accountability theory in brief: incumbency bias emerges and varies because democratic institutions generate a mismatch between citizens’ expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents’ capacity to deliver. The chapter clarifies how this argument builds and expands upon prior work on incumbency bias in Latin America and the US, and how it draws theoretical insights from theoretical and empirical work on electoral accountability. The chapter also distils contrasting predictions between bounded accountability and theories that stress corruption and clientelism as the drivers of incumbency advantage and disadvantage. The chapter closes by describing the case selection and outlining its nested-multilevel research design that combines cross-country and within-country comparisons and employs tools of causal inference to examine incumbency bias in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

This chapter describes the data collection strategy and multimethod research design employed to test the theory in the subsequent chapters of the book. The structure of the empirical analysis mirrors the book’s primary argument: to show how peacekeeping works from the bottom up, from the individual to the community to the country. Given that UN peacekeepers deploy to the most violent areas, the design needed to account for selection bias as well as other confounding variables in order to make causal inference possible. Using data from individual- and subnational/community-level data from Mali as well as cross-national data from the universe of multidimensional PKOs deployed in Africa, the book employs a three-part strategy to test the hypotheses in the next few chapters. First, the book considers the micro-level behavioral implications of the theory using a lab-in-the-field experiment and a survey experiment, both implemented in Mali. Second, it test whether UN peacekeepers’ ability to increase individual willingness to cooperate aggregates upward to prevent communal violence in Mali. Third, the book considers whether these findings extend to other countries.

Field research refers to research conducted with a high degree of naturalism. The first part of this chapter provides a definition of field research and discusses advantages and limitations. We then provide a brief overview of observational field research methods, followed by an in-depth overview of experimental field research methods. We discuss randomization schemes of different types in field experimentation, such as cluster randomization, block randomization, and randomized rollout or waitlist designs, as well as statistical implementation concerns when conducting field experiments, including spillover, attrition, and noncompliance. The second part of the chapter provides an overview of important considerations when conducting field research. We discuss the psychology of construal in the design of field research, conducting non-WEIRD field research, replicability and generalizability, and how technological advances have impacted field research. We end by discussing career considerations for psychologists who want to get involved in field research.

In most social psychological studies, researchers conduct analyses that treat participants as a random effect. This means that inferential statistics about the effects of manipulated variables address the question whether one can generalize effects from the sample of participants included in the research to other participants that might have been used. In many research domains, experiments actually involve multiple random variables (e.g., stimuli or items to which participants respond, experimental accomplices, interacting partners, groups). If analyses in these studies treat participants as the only random factor, then conclusions cannot be generalized to other stimuli, items, accomplices, partners, or groups. What are required are mixed models that allow multiple random factors. For studies with single experimental manipulations, we consider alternative designs with multiple random factors, analytic models, and power considerations. Additionally, we discuss how random factors that vary between studies, rather than within them, may induce effect size heterogeneity, with implications for power and the conduct of replication studies.