Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [183]
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Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). The quotations that follow are from the uncorrected proof of the Preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 13. Their book reprints important articles that have expressed criticism of Designing Social Inquiry by Larry Bartels, Ronald Rogowski, David Collier, James Mahoney, James Seawright; Gerardo Munck, Charles C. Ragin, Timothy J. McKeown, and Sidney Tarrow. It also reprints the reply made by Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba to comments on Designing Social Inquiry made in the symposium on their book in the American Political Science Review, Volume 89, Number 2 (June 1995), pp. 475-481.
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Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 65 (September 1971), pp. 682-693.
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Eckstein, “Case Studies and Theory in Political Science,” p. 85. King, Keohane, and Verba reject the term “case” as subject to too many uses and substitute “observations” for “cases” (Designing Social Inquiry, p. 52), but this leads to ambiguity as well. See, for example, DSI’s discussion of whether Eckstein viewed cases as having single or multiple observations, pp. 210-211. Our reading is that Eckstein envisioned multiple process-tracing observations in each case study despite his definition of a case as having one measure of the dependent variable. (In our view it is more precise to speak of one instance of the dependent variable, which may have several qualitative measures.) A full discussion of DSI’s advice on how to generate additional observable implications of a theory is presented in Chapter 8.
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Alexander L. George, “Case Studies and Theory Development,” paper presented at Carnegie-Mellon University, October 15-16, 1982, p. 45. For a similar definition by sociologists, see Charles Ragin’s, “Introduction” in Charles Ragin and Howard Becker, eds., What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-3. In the concluding chapter (“‘Casing’ and the Process of Social Inquiry”), Ragin emphasizes the importance for theory development of focusing research on specific subclasses of a phenomena, which he calls “casing” (pp. 217-226).
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The Cuban Missile Crisis is treated as a case of deterrence failure in Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); as a case of coercive diplomacy in Alexander L. George, David K. Hall, and William E. Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); and as a case of crisis management in Ole R. Holsti, Crisis, Escalation, War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972).
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It is important to note that the definition of which independent variables are relevant to the class of events remains open to revision as the research proceeds. In conducting interviews, reading secondary accounts, or reviewing historical documents, the researcher may inductively discover independent variables that previous theories may have overlooked. This inductive side to identifying variables is open also to statistical researchers who are constructing their own data sets from primary and secondary sources, but it is closed to statistical studies that rely on existing data sets, as well as to the purely deductive development of formal models.
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Ragin and Becker, eds., What is a Case?; and David Collier, “Translating Quantitative Methods for Qualitative Researchers: The Case of Selection Bias,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 461, 465.
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Richard Locke and Kathleen Thelen, “Problems of Equivalence in Comparative Politics: Apples and Oranges, Again,” American Political Science Association: Comparative Politics Newsletter,