Pre-Registration Protocol: Inter-Coder Reliability of the Urban Living Lab Legal Enablement (ULE) Instrument

This record deposits the pre-registration protocol for a study of inter-coder reliability in the Urban Living Lab Legal Enablement (ULE) instrument, together with the documentary corpus on which the coding will be performed. It is deposited before any coder receives materials, and the date of deposit is the reference point for every claim of prior specification the protocol makes. The ULE instrument scores five conditions of legal enablement across urban cases. Its scores have so far been assigned by a single coder, the author. This study asks whether independent coders working from the published codebook reach the same scores, and whether they converge on the author's own published scores where those exist. Five US metropolitan cases are used: Milwaukee and Washington DC, for which no author scores are published, and New York City, Philadelphia and Portland, for which they are. Twenty-five condition cells are scored in total. Agreement is measured with Krippendorff's alpha on an ordinal metric, against thresholds fixed in advance. The corpus comprises 90 documents: Milwaukee 18, Washington DC 17, New York City 18, Philadelphia 22, Portland 15. The author supplies the corpus and coders score it; coders do not collect documents. Holding the corpus fixed is what isolates the interpretive step, and it only does so if every coder is handed the same text. Every entry has therefore been resolved to a single retrievable document with a full citation and an open locator, and every locator was resolved against the issuing authority's own publication on 30 September 2026. Appendix B of the protocol reports what compilation and verification found, including errors in the author's own first pass at the corpus. Two instruments had been entered twice under different names; three had been named incorrectly, among them a state statute title that turned out to be a regional code and a grant programme that does not exist under the name given. Two documents recorded as being in force are not: Portland's 2015 Climate Action Plan was repealed in 2022, and the 2020 amendments to the District of Columbia's stormwater regulations were never finalised. Seven candidate entries were dropped because no fixed publicly retrievable text stands behind them. The protocol states in advance what a low alpha would require of the author, commits to publication regardless of outcome, and treats the disagreement analysis as an outcome rather than a nuisance. It may be amended only before the first coder package is distributed; after that, any departure is reported as a deviation. Files: the protocol; corpus_index.csv, the full 90-document corpus; five per-city extracts; and the scoring template issued to coders, whose fields correspond to the mandatory fields of the codebook.