Doing Archival Research in Political Science By Scott A. Frisch, ...

But it could and has happened. Parker nearly experienced cardiac arrest on one research trip. He was studying two Senate campaigns—Idaho senator Frank Church’s defeat in 1980 to Congressman Steve Symms and Symms’s near-loss in 1986 to Idaho governor John Evans. The 1980 campaign was well documented in both the Church and Symms archives. The 1986 campaign, however, was not well preserved in the archival record. In particular, the polls commissioned by the Symms campaign in 1985 and 1986 were nowhere to be found in the Symms papers located at the College of Idaho in Caldwell. The polls undertaken by Governor Evans were not located in his papers at the Idaho Historical Society. However, a subsequent interview with Evans’s campaign manager yielded the name of Evans’s pollster, who—fortunately—had kept some of the polls from the 1986 race. Parker received the polling data in the form of a PDF the following day after calling the polling firm directly. The archives informed Parker that polls existed—but he had to go through some additional steps to find them. The lesson is that persistence and creative thinking can overcome a disappointing archival experience.

Remember a piece of advice that nearly every author in this volume offers: keep an open mind. Be open to the serendipity involved in archival research. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, you may not find what you want, but you find sometimes that you get what you need. As Frisch and Kelly recount briefly in chapter 1, their book on Jimmy Carter was the result of a “failed” trip to the Carter presidential library. By maintaining a broad awareness of the issues that were covered in files related to their topic, they discovered the means to test presidential influence in Congress using new, innovative, and particularly appropriate data.

Reason Three: A Great Deal of Time Is Needed

Archival research requires a time commitment. In our experience, trips average about three days. That is a nontrivial amount of time away from work and family. But one should ask oneself: How many hours in the last year have been spent drinking coffee or having lunch with colleagues? How many hours have been spent in committee meetings? Think about