Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [134]
• Collective Action: Would a contribution from the country in question (including the use of military bases) be important to achieving the public good of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait?
• Balance of Threat: Did the country face a potential military threat from Iraq?
• Alliance Dilemma: Was the country dependent on the United States for its security?
• Domestic Politics: Did the public, legislature, and national security organizations generally favor a contribution?
The table also shows the placement of cases from both the first and second studies into their respective types. The coding of the cases is greatly simplified from the measures in the actual case studies, particularly for cases of France, Syria, and the Soviet Union, each of which contributed politically, militarily, or both to the Gulf coalition in part to “share the spoils” as part of the winning side and to maintain or establish good relations with the United States, even though none was greatly reliant on the United States for its security. Syria and the Soviet Union thus constituted deviant cases to some degree, drawing attention to “share the spoils” or “offensive bandwagoning” motives as an important factor omitted from the typological theory.
Table 11.1. A Typological Theory on Burden-Sharing in the 1991 Gulf War.
The typological table shows how it was possible to reduce substantially the number of types of interest and select which cases to study. Cases that were overdetermined by a mix of variables or by a few variables at extreme values, such as the Kuwaiti and Saudi contributions to the Desert Storm coalition, were deemed unlikely to be theoretically informative. (If such states had failed to contribute, they would have constituted potentially useful deviant cases.) The same was true of overdetermined noncontributors—distant states not threatened by Iraq, not dependent on oil or the world economy, and not reliant on the United States for their security.
The first study thus conducted case studies of the leading contributors: the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Egypt. These states varied substantially in the kind of contributions they made, and provided most-likely cases for all but one of the theories whose variables contributed to the typological theory. (The exception was the balance of threat theory, with its overdetermined most-likely cases of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). However, as the authors noted, this first study relaxed the ideal criteria for case selection; it did not include studies of states that might have contributed but did not do so. The second study, which included additional case studies by regional experts, included a noncontributing “free-rider,” Iran. This second study also included an abbreviated examination (or “mini-case study”) of China, a state whose failure to make a substantial or costly contribution appeared to be (and upon closer study indeed was) overdetermined. This illustrates how abbreviated case studies can be used to fill in types that are unlikely to be surprising.
Finally, the second study included a brief examination of countries’ contributions to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) and the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) peacekeeping mission that succeeded it. This allowed a further test of the theoretical framework in a separate coalition. It also provided a before-after comparison of the effects of the alliance security dilemma variable, since the United States largely stayed out of the UNPROFOR mission but then joined the IFOR coalition and pushed others to do the same. Of course, this comparison is imperfect, as the 1995