Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [154]
The project, therefore, was clearly an exploratory study. Its detailed findings offered many hypotheses and pointed to how systematic analysis of history from a multitheoretical perspective suggested a new methodological approach. A codification of the study’s methodology (not attempted here) would suggest that it was an important precursor of the method of structured, focused comparison that made considerable use of analytical process-tracing.
Also noteworthy was that the authors decided that purely idiographic, detailed historical explanations would not serve their purposes, and that the seven historical episodes had to be transformed into “analytical episodes.”576 In this respect, the authors anticipated by almost thirty years the research by Robert Bates and his co-authors, reported in Analytic Narratives.577Indeed, the Almond project went much further in articulating explicit methods for evaluating seemingly competing explanations and theories.
HUGH HECLO, MODERN SOCIAL POLITICS IN BRITAIN AND SWEDEN. NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1974.
This book is an example of careful specification of a research problem and a research objective. The general problem that interested Heclo was the relationship of the political process in democratic societies to the choices made in welfare policy. Recognizing that this general problem arises in many democratic states with respect to a variety of welfare policies, Heclo decided that to make the study more manageable he would focus on fewer countries and on one set of welfare policies. Accordingly, he designated a subclass of income maintenance policies that were undertaken during the last century and limited the study to a comparison of Britain and Sweden, which he regarded as well suited to comparative analysis. A further delimitation of the study concentrated on three important income maintenance policies: unemployment insurance; old age pensions; and superannuation (earnings-related occupational insurance).
Heclo’s research objective was to assess the explanatory power of four general theories bearing on the problem and demonstrate the need for a more differentiated in-depth analysis of how democratic political processes operate to affect social policy choices. Accordingly, he focused on a few detailed cases rather than undertaking a large-N statistical analysis. Heclo seems to have recognized that a “controlled comparison” would not be possible since the two cases did not match in every respect but one, and therefore did not provide the functional equivalent of an experiment. Accordingly, he relied heavily on historical explanation (process-tracing) of developments in social welfare policy in each country. His developmental analysis approximated a complex before-after type of assessment to explain changes in welfare policy over time. Each developmental case for Britain and Sweden is broken into a series of subcases that unfold over time. The subcases are, of course, not independent of each other, a fact which Heclo recognizes and makes use of in emphasizing the critical role of “policy learning” in both countries.
PETER B. EVANS, HAROLD K. JACOBSON, AND ROBERT D. PUTNAM, EDS., DOUBLE-EDGED DIPLOMACY: INTERNATIONAL BARGAINING AND DOMESTIC POLITICS. BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1993.
This study provides a useful counterpoint to those to which we have already referred. In this study, the authors defined their research objective very broadly: they wished to examine the interrelationship between international bargaining and domestic politics in a variety of issue-areas and settings. The class of events, accordingly, included case studies of security issues, economic disputes, and North-South tensions. This study also illustrated the need for a close correspondence