Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [192]
158
Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (December 1970), pp. 1033-1053.
159
Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (September 1971), pp. 682-693; and Harry Eckstein, “Case Studies and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 7 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 79-138.
160
Eckstein, “Case Studies and Theory,” p. 99.
161
Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
162
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
163
David Collier, “Translating Quantitative Methods for Qualitative Researchers: The Case of Selection Bias,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 461-466; and Ronald Rogowski, “The Role of Theory and Anomaly in Social-Science Inference,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 467-470. Theory development via building blocks is useful also in the absence of equifinality. Contingent generalizations are possible, and indeed easier to formulate, when equifinality is not present. For an example of this approach see George and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy.
164
Joseph Grieco criticizes Robert O. Keohane’s After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984) on both counts in his detailed criticism of the research design in this important study, to which Keohane replies in David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
165
Van Evera, Guide to Methods.
166
For illustrative examples, see the Appendix, “Studies That Illustrate Research Design.”
167
A similar point is made by Robert Keohane in his critique of structural realism. He notes that it is desirable to select a smaller subclass of a phenomenon in order “to achieve greater precision” of a theory. This entails “narrowing” the “domain of a the ory.” Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 187-188.
168
For example, see the discussion in the Appendix of Ariel Levite, Bruce Jentleson, and Larry Berman, eds., Foreign Military Intervention: The Dynamics of Protracted Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). See also the discussion of “middle-range” theory in Chapter 12.
169
This research dilemma is discussed by Sidney Verba in his detailed commentary on Robert A. Dahl, ed., Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), and in Sidney Verba, “Some Dilemmas in Comparative Research,” World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 1 (October 1967), pp. 122-123.
170
David Laitin, “Disciplining Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 454-456. We say “almost” since single case studies take place within the context of ongoing research programs, so that studies of single cases may draw comparisons to existing studies; thus, “the community of scientists,” rather than the “individual researcher” is the relevant context in which to judge case selection.
171
Rogowski, “The Role of Theory and Anomaly in Social-Scientific Inference”; Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935 (New York: Watts, 1965); and Peter Alexis Gourevitch, “The International System and Regime