Typologies are a well-established analytic tool in the social sciences. Working with typologies contributes decisively to forming concepts, exploring dimensionality, establishing measurement categories, and grouping cases. Yet some critics – basing their arguments on what they believe to be...

Both qualitative and quantitative research routinely fall short, producing misleading causal inferences. Because these weaknesses are in part different, we are convinced that multi-method strategies are productive. Each approach can provide additional leverage that helps address shortcomings of...

Analysts who developed the set-theoretic comparative method (STCM) have formulated admirable goals for researchers who work in the qualitative and multi-method tradition. This method includes above all Charles Ragin’s innovative approach of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). However, the...

The set-theoretic comparative method (STCM) — including very centrally Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) — has formulated valuable goals for comparative research. This symposium raises serious concerns about the specific analytic tools advocated for pursuing these important goals....

In the fall of 2002, over 1,000 members of the American Political Science Association—including 28 former Association Presidents and seven former APSR editors—signed a petition to launch a new APSA Organized Section for Qualitative Methods. The proposed section would sponsor training and...

Analysts who developed the set-theoretic comparative method (STCM) have formulated valuable goals for researchers who work in the qualitative and multi-method tradition. This method includes above all Charles Ragin's Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), along with further systematization of...

Spanish Abstract: Pese a que se ha entendido que el surgimiento de los regímenes autoritarios se relaciona con los problemas del desarrollo económico a partir del "modelo burocrático-autoritario", algunos elementos de este modelo han producido entre los estudiosos ciertas ideas para...

English Abstract: The “bureaucratic-authoritarian model” was one of the most important attempts to explain the emergence of authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, giving special attention to the connection between their emergence and problems of economic development....

This symposium brings together ten essays that explore hypotheses about critical junctures, understood as major episodes of institutional innovation that generate an enduring legacy. Scholars routinely focus on episodes of innovation that occur in contrasting ways across cases, which in turn...

Social security is one of the most important means by which modern nations protect the welfare of their citizens. The first appearance of social security represents a particularly important policy juncture at which many nations broke from the anti-welfare doctrine of traditional liberalism. The...