It is a great honor to have been invited to deliver the Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture. Professor de Sola Pool had a tremendous influence on scholarship and practice. His work describes the ways in which evolving technologies fundamentally alter communicative expectations and social outcomes. Years after their publication, works such as Technologies of Freedom (1984) continue to provide insight about how the networked communications are changing the world. Professor de Sola Pool's work is of great public value. In what follows, I want to focus our attention on the value of social science today.

In his classic book, Reflections on Public Administration, John Gaus (1947) wrote about the factors that he saw interacting to either increase or reduce growth in government in the United States. “I put before you,” he wrote, “a list of the factors which I have found useful as explaining the ebb and flow of the functions of government.” His “ecology of government” included changes in “people, place, physical technology, social technology, wishes and ideas, catastrophe, and personality.” He continued, “Such [are] the ‘raw material of politics’ and hence of administration [and] are in themselves the raw material of a science of administration” (9).

In 2012, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Council adopted new policies guiding data access and research transparency in political science. The policies appear as a revision to APSA's Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science. The revisions were the product of an extended and broad consultation with a variety of APSA committees and the association's membership.

As an abstract idea, openness is difficult to oppose. Social scientists from every research tradition agree that scholars cannot just assert their conclusions, but must also share their evidentiary basis and explain how they were reached. Yet practice has not always followed this principle. Most forms of qualitative empirical inquiry have taken a minimalist approach to openness, providing only limited information about the research process, and little or no access to the data underpinning findings. What scholars do when conducting research, how they generate data, and how they make interpretations or draw inferences on the basis of those data, are rarely addressed at length in their published research. Even in book-length monographs which have an extended preface and footnotes, it can sometimes take considerable detective work to piece together a picture of how authors arrived at their conclusions.

Qualitative political science, the use of textual evidence to reconstruct causal mechanisms across a limited number of cases, is currently undergoing a methodological revolution. Many qualitative scholars—whether they use traditional case-study analysis, analytic narrative, structured focused comparison, counterfactual analysis, process tracing, ethnographic and participant-observation, or other methods—now believe that the richness, rigor, and transparency of qualitative research ought to be fundamentally improved.