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crucial or nearly crucial case can strongly support or undermine a theory. Second, good case study researchers should be careful to avoid overgeneralizing their conclusions or claiming to have uncovered all possible causal paths. Finding cases that represent previously undocumented causal paths has always been a priority for case study researchers. Third, as our example of alliance burden-sharing indicates, much of the property space in a given study can be set aside as unlikely or uninformative, allowing relatively strong inferences from even a small number of cases if they fall into the types of greatest interest. Fourth, the use of previously validated causal mechanisms or social theories to build typological frameworks, together with the use of process-tracing and other methods of within-case analysis, can strengthen the inferences that would otherwise have to be made on the basis of comparative methods alone. Fifth, it is important to distinguish between instances where the range of extant historical cases is insufficient for strong causal inferences and instances in which the researcher does not have the resources to study all of the potentially informative cases. In the former instance, case study methods will be weak but may be the only methods available. In the latter, researchers may focus their efforts on a subset of the property space, where even a few cases may exhaust the causal paths of most interest, they may add mini-case studies of otherwise unexamined types to test and strengthen their inferences.

Conclusion

The use of case studies for the development of typological theories, and the use of these theories to design case study research and select cases, are iterative processes that involve both inductive study and deductive theorizing. An inductive, building-block approach to developing typological theories can identify causal paths and variables relevant to a given outcome. Such an approach is particularly useful in new or emerging research programs and in the study of deviant cases. Ultimately, as additional cases are examined, this building-block process can outline an increasingly comprehensive map of all of the causal paths to an outcome. A deductive approach to typological theorizing can help test established theories when they are available and propose integrative theories that incorporate interaction effects and address the problem of equifinality. Combining these modes of inductive and deductive development of typological theories with methods of within-case analysis, particularly process-tracing, can substantially reduce the limitations of Mill’s methods and other methods of comparison.

A greater awareness of the strengths and uses of typological theories and case studies, however, also provides a sharper understanding of their limits. Typological theories, case studies, process-tracing, and congruence tests can only reduce the inferential limits that are similar to those that afflict Mill’s methods of agreement and difference. Left-out variables and measurement errors can undermine causal inferences no matter what methods are used. Case study researchers should be sensitive to interaction effects, but there is no guarantee that they will incorporate and explain such effects adequately. Finally, when low-probability causal relations hold and there are only a few cases, no methods of causal inference work well.

Chapter 12

Case Studies and Policy-Relevant Theory

Political scientists generally agree that research in their field should address important real-world problems.508 This view is expressed not only by international relations scholars but also by scholars in the American and comparative politics fields and adherents of the rational choice approach. Participants in a symposium on “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics,” for example, agreed that “comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study. What motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real world significance… . This problem orientation distinguishes comparative politics