Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [180]
4
See Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 95-103. The earlier book, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, edited by Alexander L. George, David K. Hall, and William E. Simons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), was a comparative study of three cases, but did not explicitly follow the rubrics of structured, focused comparison. However, this was the research design of U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures, Lessons, coedited with Philip T. Farley and Alexander Dallin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
5
Alexander L. George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparison,” in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., Diplomatic History: New Approaches (New York: Free Press, 1979).
6
Alexander L. George, “The Causal Nexus Between Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-Making Behavior: The ‘Operational Code’ Belief System,” in Lawrence S. Falkowski, ed., Psychological Models in International Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 95-124.
7
Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and Andrew Bennett, Joseph Lepgold, and Danny Unger, eds., Friends in Need: Burden-Sharing in the Gulf War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
8
Andrew Bennett, Aharon Barth, and Ken Rutherford, “Do We Preach What We Practice? A Survey of Methods in Political Science Journals and Curricula,” P.S.: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 36, No. 3 (July 2003), p. 375.
9
Ibid., p. 376.
10
A useful commentary on developments in case study research is provided by Jack Levy, “Qualitative Methods in International Relations,” in Michael Brecher and Frank P. Harvey, eds., Millennial Reflections on International Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 432-454. See also the excellent treatment of these issues in Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). In their 1996 review of the state of political science, Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann argue that in the “Jacobin” behavioral revolution of the 1960s and the “Thermidorian” reaction that followed, contending factions “heaped Olympian scorn” on one another. This scenario was then replayed in the “Manichean” controversy over rational choice theory. More recently, they argue, there has been a “rapprochement,” fostered by the rise of the “new institutionalism,” and “political scientists no longer think in the either/or terms of agency or structure, interests or institutions … realism or idealism, interests or ideas … science or story-telling … mono-causality or hopeless complexity.” They do not see this rapprochement as a sloppy “‘live and let live’ pluralism,” but as a sign that the present generation of political scientists are “equipped with a richer toolkit than their predecessors.” Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, eds., A New Handbook of Political Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 10-13.
11
Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford, p. 374.
12
While at this general level the epistemologies of alternative research methods are quite similar, significant differences remain, as these methods are optimized for different epistemic aims. These aims include the estimation of measures of correlation for populations of cases and the establishment of probabilistic levels of confidence that these correlations are not due to chance (tasks at which statistical methods are effective when the assumptions necessary for these methods are met), the development and testing of historical