Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [52]
Most historians also rely heavily on chronological narrative as an organizing device for presenting the case study materials. Preserving some elements of the chronology of the case may be indispensable for supporting the theory-oriented analysis, and it may be highly desirable to do so in order to enable readers not already familiar with the history of the case to comprehend the analysis. Striking the right balance between a detailed historical description of the case and development of a theoretically-focused explanation of it is a familiar challenge. Analysts frequently feel it necessary to reduce the length of a case study to avoid overly long accounts that exceed the usual limits for journal articles or even books! The more cases, the more difficult this problem becomes.
There is no easy answer to this dilemma. Still, it has been dealt with in a reasonably effective way by a number of writers. A brief résumé of the case at the beginning of the analysis gives readers the essential facts about the development and outcome of the case. The ensuing write-up can blend additional historical detail with analysis.192 Presentation of a case need not always include a highly detailed or exclusively chronological narrative. As a theory becomes better developed and as research focuses on more tightly defined targets, there will be less need to present overly long narratives. Moreover, narrative accounts of a case can be supplemented by such devices as decision trees, sketches of the internal analytical structure of the explanation, or even computer programs to display the logic of the actors’ decisions or the sequence of internal developments within the case.
Some Challenges in Attempting to Reconstruct Decisions
Scholars who attempt to reconstruct the policymaking process in order to explain important decisions face challenging problems. An important limitation of the analysis presented here is that it is drawn solely from the study of U.S. foreign policy.193 We discuss first the task of acquiring reliable data on factors that entered into the policy process and evaluating their impact on the decision. Political scientists must often rely upon, or at least make use of, historians’ research on the policy in question. Such historical studies can be extremely useful to political scientists, but several cautions should be observed in making use of these studies.
First, researchers should forgo the temptation to rely on a single, seemingly authoritative study of the case at hand by a historian. Such a shortcut overlooks the fact that competent historians who have studied that case often disagree on how best to explain it. As Ian Lustick has argued, “the work of historians is not … an unproblematic background narrative from which theoretically neutral data can be elicited for the framing of problems and the testing of theories.”194 Lustick approvingly notes Norman Cantor’s argument that a historian’s work represents “a picture of ‘what happened’ that is just as much a function of his or her personal commitments, the contemporary political issues with which s/he was engaged, and the methodological choices governing his or her work.”195 The danger here, Lustick argues, is that a researcher who draws upon too narrow a set of historical accounts that emphasizes the variables of interest may overstate the performance of favored hypotheses.
It is thus necessary to identify and summarize important debates among historians about competing explanations of a case, and wherever possible to indicate the possible political and historical biases of the contending authors. The researcher should translate these debates