Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [8]
In addition to clarifying the comparative advantages of case studies, this book codifies the best practices in the use of case studies; examines their relationship to debates in the philosophy of science; and refines the concept of middle-range or typological theories and the procedures through which case studies can contribute to them. Our focus extends to all aspects of theory development, including the generation of new hypotheses as well as the testing of existing ones.
Throughout the book, we have paid special attention to the method of process-tracing, which attempts to trace the links between possible causes and observed outcomes. In process- tracing, the researcher examines histories, archival documents, interview transcripts, and other sources to see whether the causal process a theory hypothesizes or implies in a case is in fact evident in the sequence and values of the intervening variables in that case. Process-tracing might be used to test whether the residual differences between two similar cases were causal or spurious in producing a difference in these cases’ outcomes. Or the intensive study of one deviant case, a case that fails to fit existing theories, may provide significant theoretical insights. Process-tracing can perform a heuristic function as well, generating new variables or hypotheses on the basis of sequences of events observed inductively in case studies.
Typological theories also receive more attention than their one-chapter allotment in the book would suggest. Such theories provide one way of modeling complex contingent generalizations. They frequently draw together in one framework the research of many social scientists, cumulating their individual efforts into a larger body of knowledge. The procedures we recommend for developing typological theories also foster the integration of within-case analyses and cross-case comparisons, and they help researchers opportunistically match up the types of case studies needed for alternative research designs and the extant cases that history provides. This helps to resolve the problem of case selection, one of the most challenging aspects of case study research designs. In addition, typological theories can guide researchers toward questions and research designs whose results will be pertinent to problems faced by policymakers. One of the chief goals of political science, as noted in Chapter 12, is to provide policymakers with “generic knowledge” that will help them form effective strategies.
Highly general and abstract theories (“covering laws,” in Carl Hempel’s term), which set aside intervening processes and focus on correlations between the “start” and “finish” of a phenomenon, are too general to make sharp theoretical predictions or to guide policy.13 For example, Kenneth Waltz’s structural-realist theory, which posits that the material structure of the international system—the number of great powers, the balance of material power among them, the nature of contemporary military and economic technologies, and the geography of the system—creates structural incentives (such as the incentive to balance against other powerful states) that states can defy only at their peril. Though this theory dominated the field of international relations for some time, it is not a theory of foreign policy, as Waltz himself emphasizes, but a theory of constraints on foreign policy and of the predicted price to be paid for ignoring them.14
Theories that describe independent, stable causal mechanisms that