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

appointments, because of privacy and confidentiality issues and because of calculations on researcher use versus scarcity of space and financial resources.¹¹

Archivists, however, do not have a stake in advancing or protecting the reputation of a member or his or her staff. The decisions they make to keep or dispense with materials adhere to carefully developed standards of the profession and are therefore unlikely to create the systematic gaps that introduce bias which would undermine the development of descriptive inference.

The second source of bias concerns the political papers within congressional papers. These often contain the personal and campaign papers of the member and are often produced by the member or his or her campaign staff. The source of the bias, however, is unlikely to be pernicious. The world of campaigns is transitory by its very nature, and once a campaign is over, records are often simply trashed en masse. Campaign staffers come and go, likely taking some of the campaign records with them. The records of campaigns are the ones that are most likely to be incomplete and exhibit gaps, but the nature of the missing record is likely due to natural processes rather than to some systematic effort to delete particular records while leaving others behind. That said, the most important documents—such as polls, targeting memos, and the like—are often distributed among key campaign staffers as well as to the member’s upper-echelon congressional staff. It is these memos—which are the most important for the researcher—that are the most likely to survive the campaign process intact. Parker has found copies of polls and campaign memos scattered throughout collections, sometimes in the political papers of a member, at other times in the papers of congressional staff members who had no “official” role in the campaign.

The third source of bias is papers missing from the collection outright because a staff member took them when departing the member’s employ. Former staffers may decide to retain these records themselves, but they often donate them separately to the archives. Two ways to avoid this