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Similarly, statistical-correlational findings about different aspects of international relations are not without some value for policymaking, but their usefulness is often sharply reduced because such studies often do not include causal variables that the decision-maker can influence. Policymakers need knowledge that identifies the causal processes and causal mechanisms that explain how an antecedent condition or variable is linked in well-defined contexts to variance in the outcome variable. Thus, policy-relevant research tries to go beyond statistical-correlational findings in order to identify causal processes.

The science of microbiology and its relation to medical practice offers a highly relevant model. Consider the relationship of smoking cigarettes (and exposure to other carcinogens) to cancer. Statistical-correlational studies have long since convinced most of us that some kind of causal relationship does indeed exist. These studies were thus policy-relevant even though the underlying mechanism was not known. It is better, however, to understand the causal mechanism and process that links exposure to carcinogens to cancer, and use them to develop policy interventions. To use an analogy, a person stranded on a desert island has more use for a barometer than for a theory of weather. Observing the barometer would soon lead to a rough prediction of incoming storms. However, the combination of a barometer and a theory of weather would lead to far more precise predictions on how air pressure, temperature, prevailing wind patterns, and other factors will shape the weather. Similarly, microbiologists have been working for years—lately with considerable success—to identify the intervening causal processes between smoking and cancer. Finding causal links between smoking and cancer creates opportunities for developing intervention techniques to halt the development of cancer.

In the same way, a knowledge of causal mechanisms and patterns offers foreign policy practitioners opportunities to identify possibilities for using leverage to influence outcomes of interaction with other actors. Of course, the success of microbiology in identifying causal mechanisms may not be easily duplicated in the study of international relations or in other branches of political science. Nonetheless, it is heartening that in recent years political scientists have increasingly recognized the importance of studying causal processes and causal mechanisms.

Developing Policy-Relevant Knowledge

How can scholars develop the knowledge that practitioners need in order to deal with different problems that arise in the implementation of foreign policy? This, indeed, is the subject of the preceding chapters. In brief:

• Theory-oriented case studies of past historical experience with different problems and different strategies are needed to identify and cumulate the lessons of experience into usable knowledge for policymaking.

• Within-case analysis and process-tracing are important alternatives to reliance on variable-oriented approaches that attempt to replicate the experimental method.

• Individual case studies can contribute to all phases of theory development.

• The method of structured, focused comparison provides a research strategy for single as well as comparative case studies. In this alternative research approach, a “case” should be considered to be an instance of a class of events (rather than simply as a single measure of a key variable).

• Middle-range theories are more likely to constitute usable knowledge for policy than broad, general theories.

• Middle-range theory is produced by identifying sub-classes of a major phenomenon and by selecting instances of each particular sub-class for study. This is one of the major conclusions we have drawn from many efforts in the past thirty years to use case studies for theory development.

• Finally, development of usable knowledge derived from historical experience is enhanced if scholars are attentive to the phenomenon of equifinality (multiple causation) and to the