Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [158]
STEPHEN M. WALT, REVOLUTION AND WAR. ITHACA: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996.
The central question addressed by the author is “whether revolutions encourage states to view the external environment in ways that intensify their security competition and make war appear to be a more attractive option.”596
The research design includes two interrelated components: the choice of what type of revolution to study influences the selection of historical cases. Walt distinguishes two basic types of revolution: mass revolutions (or “revolutions from below”) and elite revolutions (or “revolutions from above”). He chooses to focus principally on mass revolutions, because such revolutions are “more common and because their international effects are usually more worrisome.” This excludes not only elite revolutions but also “most civil wars, unless the victorious faction eventually imposes a new political order in its society.”597 He also notes but puts aside a definition employed in statistical studies of the general phenomenon of revolutions as including any violent regime change, of which there are well over a hundred cases.
Walt chose to focus on a well-specified subclass, a certain type of revolution of which there exists a smaller number of historical cases. Nonetheless, Walt recognizes that there are more such cases than he chooses to include in his study, but he believes that the seven cases he singles out are “sufficiently representative” so that “the inclusion of other cases would not undermine my fundamental results.”598 These seven are the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions, which he examines in detail, and shorter studies of the American, Mexican, Turkish, and Chinese revolutions.599 Walt recognizes that the precise nature of the revolutionary process differs in these cases but that all are widely recognized as revolutionary events.
Walt notes that although each of these seven revolutions “led to greater security competition between the new regime and several other powers … open warfare occurred in only four of them.” He contrasts these four cases with the three in which war was avoided in an effort “to discern why war follows some revolutions but not others.”600
The research design and the procedures followed include several different types of comparisons. First, a before-after comparison is made for each country, using “the old regime as a control case in order to isolate the independent impact of the revolution on [its] foreign policy.”601
Second, to test his theory that explains why revolutions increased the level of security competition, Walt undertakes to process-trace the relationship between each revolutionary state and its main foreign interlocutors for at least ten years after the revolution. 602 Walt explains that process-tracing “is especially appropriate because the universe of cases is too small for a statistical analysis and the number of independent variables too large for a rigorous application of John Stuart Mill’s ‘method of difference. ’”603 Process-tracing is appropriate also “because my theory focuses on the way revolutions shape the perceptions of the relevant actors. Process-tracing allows the analyst to ‘get inside’ the case (where one may find multiple opportunities to test the theory’s predictions) and to evaluate the separate causal links that connect the explanatory variables with the predicted outcomes.”604
A third type of comparison is undertaken to explain why some revolutions lead to war. For this purpose, the French, Russian, Iranian, and Chinese revolutions are compared to the American, Mexican, and Turkish cases. This comparison does not lead to definitive results but enables the author to advance several possible explanations worthy of additional consideration.605
At various points Walt notes some limitations of the study, and interesting questions he does not address.606 His main