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In addition to employing standard methods for analysis of electoral returns, Fiorina visited both districts and talked to constituents of the congressmen. The field trips proved quite useful in developing and supporting explanatory hypotheses as to the different paths taken by the two districts.

“Clearly,” Fiorina wrote, “our two districts indicate that major changes in their congressional election patterns go hand in hand with behavioral changes on the part of the congressmen they elected.” This led the author to search for what might have produced the kind of behavioral differences observed.561

Fiorina postulated that over time, congressmen shift from functioning principally “as national policymakers,” which led to reasonably close elections resulting in marginal districts, to a heavy emphasis on “nonpartisan, nonprogrammatic constituency service”—a demand that grows as government expands, and which resulted in a shift of a district out of the marginal camp.562

JOHN W. KINGDON, AGENDAS, ALTERNATIVES, AND PUBLIC POLICIES. BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, 1984.

Kingdon identified twenty-three cases to serve as units of analysis. He addresses the possibility of case selection bias as follows: “I make no claim that twenty-three cases somehow represent all possible cases of initiative over the last three decades in health and transportation.”563 However, he also holds that these cases do constitute major instances of policy initiation and that they were coded similarly in his interviews.

Although Kingdon’s use of case studies does not address all of the requirements of the structured, focused method, they do play an important role in the analysis by providing some degree of process-tracing. These case studies “proved to be quite useful since they provided concrete instances of the process under study and since they had a dynamic quality which would not be explored using static methods of observation that concentrate on one point in time… . I used them to obtain a better understanding of the processes involved, to develop some theories of agenda setting by aggregate models based on individual cases, and to illustrate the agendas.”564

Studies From Comparative Politics

MAX WEBER (TALCOTT PARSONS, TRANS.), THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM. LOS ANGELES: ROXBURY, 1996.

We review this classic work to illustrate two basic problems that frequently afflict comparative studies: the need to specify carefully the subclass of a more general phenomenon that is the focus of investigation; and the need to avoid case selection bias. Weber’s failure to avoid these two problems is noted by Clayton Roberts:

Weber posited a correlation between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. Historians, among them Henri Pirenne, promptly disputed this thesis. By tracing the growth of capitalism [via process-tracing] in late medieval Venice, Florence, Genoa, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Cadiz, Lisbon, Rouen, Antwerp, and Lubeck, all Catholic cities, they cast serious doubt on the validity of the thesis.565

Yet, as Roberts observes, “the curious correlation between Protestantism and commercial wealth in modern Europe” intrigued other historians. Roberts cites an article by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who showed through process-tracing “that the explanation lay in the hostility of Counter-reformation Catholicism to capitalism,” a hostility that drove capitalists from a number of Catholic cities to Protestant lands.566

From this account one may assume that Weber inadvertently engaged in case selection bias and overgeneralized the findings of his study. One may also see the value, as Roberts does, of process-tracing as employed both by Weber’s critics and by Trevor-Roper in his circumscribed, delimited support for Weber’s thesis.

ROBERT PUTNAM, MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK: CIVIC TRADITIONS IN MODERN ITALY. PRINCETON, N.J.: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1993.

This study addresses both a general problem