National Perspectives and Quantitative Datasets: A Silver Lining?

As noted by other contributions to this special issue, an American perspective shapes many leading quantitative datasets used by international relations scholars. This tendency can lead to biased inferences, but it can also enhance scholarly accuracy under certain conditions. Precisely because some datasets reflect national perspectives, they are appropriate to use when seeking to test theories in which the actors of interest subscribe to the same national perspective. This argument is illustrated with the case of US democracy assistance. Using an appropriate measure of democracy reveals that—contrary to some claims in the literature—US policy-makers allocate democracy assistance in ways that reflect their perceptions of countries’ regime types, giving less democracy assistance to countries that they perceive as more democratic.