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Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “How Not to be Lakatos Intolerant: Appraising Progress in IR Research,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2002), p. 240, citing M. Carrier, “On Novel Facts: A Discussion of Criteria for Non-Ad-Hocness in the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs,” Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1988), pp. 205-231. In the philosophy of science, a theory that makes a unique prediction is said to have achieved “background theory novelty.”

232

Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton N.J.: Princeton, University Press, 1993).

233

Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Todd LaPorte and Paula Consolini, “Working in Practice but Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of ‘High Reliability Organizations,’” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1991), pp. 19-47.

234

Sagan, The Limits of Safety, pp. 13, 49.

235

Ibid., p. 45.

236

Ibid., p. 51. A debate on Sagan’s book was later published between Todd LaPorte, a leading adherent of the “high reliability” school and Charles Perrow, the founder of the “normal accidents” school. A comment on their exchange is provided by Scott Sagan in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Vol. 2, No. 4 (December 1994), pp. 205-240.

237

Sagan, The Limits of Safety, p. 49.

238

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

239

Barbara Geddes, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics,” in James A. Stimson, ed., Political Analysis, Vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). This example of the Skocpol-Geddes debate is from Collier and Mahoney, “Insights and Pitfalls,” pp. 80-82.

240

Collier and Mahoney, “Insights and Pitfalls,” p. 81.

241

Along these lines, as Chapter 2 notes, there is a debate over whether new democracies should be excluded from tests of democratic peace theories. Some view the exclusion of new democracies from statistical tests of these theories as an arbitrary way to rescue the theories from anomalous findings. Others view the exclusion as legitimate, arguing that the causal mechanisms that create a democratic peace are only very weakly established in states in transition to democracy.

242

Harry Eckstein, “Case Studies in Political Science,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 7 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), p. 118. McKeown suggests that in this regard case study researchers use an in formal version of Bayesian logic. Timothy J. McKeown, “Case Studies and the Statistical World View,” International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter 1999), pp. 161-190.

243

Similarly, Margaret Mooney Marini and Burton Singer define the “gross strength” of a causal inference on the role of a variable X as the overall evidence consistent with “X causes Y,” and they define the “net strength” on X as the gross strength of X discounted by the gross strength of alternative variables and their underlying theories. Margaret Mooney Marini and Burton Singer, “Causality in the Social Sciences,” in Clifford Clogg, ed., Sociological Methodology, Vol. 18 (1998), pp. 347-409. See also James Caporoso, “Research Design, Falsification, and the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide, ” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 458.

244

This example comes from Ronald Rogowski, “The Role of Theory and Anomaly in Social-Scientific Inference,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 467-468; the referenced works are Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and David Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interest and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951).

245

Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence