Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [218]
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Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (December 1970), pp. 1033-1053. See also David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy With Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 3 (April 1997), pp. 430-451.
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In fact, deductive typological theories of the kind described in the next section may alert researchers to the ways in which extant cases, whether few or numerous, are not a representative sample of the likely frequency distribution of such cases over a longer history. Such deductive typological frameworks encourage consideration of whether some kinds of cases are logically and socially possible but have simply not yet occurred. To take a simple physical example, a researcher could use a sample of ten rolls of two dice to represent the population of possible rolls, or they could construct population estimates by looking at all possible combinations of two dice, together with estimates of their probability. Of course, this example illustrates the principle but overstates the point, as probability estimates and causal mechanisms in social phenomena are almost never as precise as those for dice.
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In logic, what Lazarsfeld termed a property space is known as a “truth table.” Lazarsfeld used the term “substruction” for the process of developing a comprehensive property space, but as this term is not intuitive and has not become common we simply talk in terms of “constructing” the property space to refer to the comprehensive delineation of all possible combinations of the variables. Lazarsfeld’s use of the term “reduction” for narrowing a property space is more intuitive and hence we retain it. For a fuller discussion of property spaces and typologies that parallels our analysis, see Charles Ragin’s insightful chapter, “Studying Cases as Configurations,” in Charles Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
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When relevant theories are in short supply, the investigator should resort to the inductive approach. It may also be useful to draw upon the explanatory “theories in use” of participants and of regional or functional experts, rendered into theoretical form.
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Of course, theories need not be modeled as typological theories to include both agency and structures. Also, it is not possible to causally model relationships in which there is simultaneous mutual constitution between agents and structures down to the finest level of analysis observable. If relationships between agents and structures can be separated into temporal stages or different levels of analysis, however, they can be modeled in typological theories.
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Randall Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 72-107. Schweller does not explicitly style his theory as a typological one, but it fits this kind of theory as we have defined it.
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For examples, see, respectively, Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980); Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1996); and Helen Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
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Another important issue in the conversion of variables into typological theories is the question of where to put the partitions between typological categories. In other words, typologies often use categorical variables, such as “high,” “medium,” and “low,” rather than continuous variables like those used in quantitative studies. The case studies themselves can give a nuanced analysis of what the variables actually were in a given case, but the typological theory must necessarily