Qualitative Methods
Political Science 694
Winter 2006
Professors Anna Grzymala-Busse and Robert Mickey
Department of Political Science
University of Michigan
Emails and office hours:
abusse@umich.edu, Tuesdays 2-4
rmickey@umich.edu, Wednesdays 2-4
COURSE DESCRIPTION
As an effort to encourage problem-driven research, this course focuses on qualitative
methods and the problems that are best addressed using these methods. Among other
benefits, qualitative methods allow us to examine closely causal mechanisms at close
empirical proximity. Within the literature, “qualitative methods” has referred to a)
small-n research design, b) more direct interrogation of the evidence instead of distant
proxies, and c) methods that focus on mechanisms and processes, rather than
correlations. This course will examine all three of these aspects of qualitative
methods, focusing on causal inference as the main goal of social science. It also
considers some problems of inference raised by qualitative methods and some
strategies for dealing with them.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
1. Class Participation: 25%. Each student is expected to attend class regularly and to
contribute to the discussion based on assigned readings.
2. Paper(s): 75%. Each student is required to submit five papers (8-10 pages each).
Assignments for each paper will be distributed two weeks before its due date.
COURSE READINGS
The following books are available for purchase and on reserve:
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hedstrom, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An
Analytical Approach to Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yin, Robert K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.
A Coursetools site will used to distribute discussion questions, updates of the
syllabus, and other communiqués.
Philosophy of Science and Causality
Jan. 11
Week 1. Introduction: Pursuing Problem-Driven Research
Jan. 18
Week 2. Logical Positivism & Falsification
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and Reality: chapters 2-4.
Rothbart, Daniel. 1998. Science, Reason, and Reality. New York: Harcourt Brace:
chapters 8-12 (Hempel, Scriven, Cartwright, Kitcher, Salmon).
Elman, Colin and Miriam Fendius Elman. 2002. “How Not to Be Lakatos Intolerant:
Appraising Progress in IR Research.” International Studies Quarterly 46: 231-262.
Moon, Donald. “The Logic of Political Inquiry.” 1975. In Fred Greenstein and Nelson
Polsby, eds. Handbook of Political Science. Reading: MA: Addison-Wesley: 3-32.
Fay, Brian. 2001. “General Laws and Explaining Human Behavior.” In Michael Martin
and Lee McIntyre, eds., Readings in The Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge, MIT
Press.
Weber, Max. 2001 [1905]. “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical
Explanation.” In Michael Martin and Lee McIntyre, eds., Readings in The Philosophy of
Social Science. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Recommended:
Marini, Margaret and Burton Singer. 1988. “Causality in the Social Sciences.” In Clifford
Clogg, ed. Sociological Methodology: 347-409.
Lakatos, Imre. 1970. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes.” In Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 91-196.
Jan. 25
Week 3. Causal Inference: Probabilistic and Deterministic
Approaches to Causation
Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, chapters 13-14.
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Davidson, Donald. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” 1963. Journal of Philosophy 60:
685-700.
Mackie, John L. 1965. “Causes and Conditions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 2:
245-264.
Salmon, Wesley. 1998. “Scientific Explanation: Causation and Unification.” In Salmon,
Causality and Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 68-78.
Holland, Paul W. 1986. “Statistics and Causal Inference (in Theory and Methods).”
Journal of the American Statistical Association 81: 945-960.
Marini, Margaret and Burton Singer. 1988. “Causality in the Social Sciences.” In Clifford
Clogg, ed., Sociological Methodology: 347-409.
Bear F. Braumoeller and Gary Goertz. 2000. “The Methodology of Necessary
Conditions.” American Journal of Political Science 44: 844-858.
Levy, Jack S. 2003. “Necessary Conditions in Case Studies: Preferences, Constraints, and
Choices in July 1914.” In Gary Goertz and Harvey Starr, eds. Necessary Conditions:
Theory, Methodology, and Applications. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield: 113-145.
Recommended:
Brady, Henry. 2003. “Model of Causal Inference; Going Beyond the Neyman-HollandRubin Theory,” mss.
Waldner, David. 2002. “Anti Anti-Determinism…” Mss.
Monday, Jan. 30
FIRST PAPER DUE BY EMAIL AT 5PM
Research Design
Feb. 1
Week 4. Correlations vs. Causal Mechanisms: What We Can Learn
from Small and Large-n Research?
FIRST PAPER DUE AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS
Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, chapter 7.
Lieberson, Stanley. 1985. Making It Count. Berkeley: University of California Press:
pages TBA.
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Hedstrom and Swedberg. 1998. Social Mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: chapters 1-3, 5-8, 10 (Hedstrom and Swedberg, Schelling, Elster, Gambetta,
Cowen, Kuran, Boudon, Sorenson).
Hall, Peter A. 2003. “Aligning Ontology and Methodology,” in James Mahoney and
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Petersen, Roger. 1999. “Mechanisms and Structures in Comparison.” In J. Bowen and
Roger Petersen, eds. Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Recommended:
McKim, Vaughn and Stephen Turner. 1997. “Introduction.” In McKim and Turner, eds.
Causality in Crisis? Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the
Social Sciences. University of Notre Dame: 1-19.
Feb. 8
Week 5. Small-n Research Design: Critiques
Lijphart, Arend. 1975. “The Comparable-Case Strategy in Comparative Research.”
Comparative Political Studies 8: 158-77.
Sekhon, Jasjeet S. 2004. “Quality Meets Quantity: Case Studies, Conditional Probability,
and Counterfactuals.” Perspectives on Politics. Available at
http://sekhon.polisci.berkeley.edu/papers/QualityQuantity.pdf
Achen, Christopher and Duncan Snidal. 1989. “Rational Deterrence Theory and
Comparative Case Studies.” World Politics 41: 144-169.
Lieberson, Stanley. 1991. “Small N's and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the
Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases.” Social Forces:
307-320.
Geddes, Barbara. 1990. “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get:
Selection Bias in Comparative Politics.” Political Analysis 2: 131-50.
Feb. 15
Week 6. Small-n Research Design: Responses
Collier, David and James Mahoney. 1996. “Insights and Pitfalls: Selection Bias in
Qualitative Research.” World Politics 49: 56-91
Dion, Douglas. 1998. “Evidence and Inference in the Comparative Case Study.”
Comparative Politics 30:127-45.
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Campbell, Donald. 1975. “ ‘Degrees of Freedom’ and the Case Study.” Comparative
Political Studies 8: 178-193.
Mahoney, James. 2000. “Strategies of Causal Inference in Small-N Analysis.”
Sociological Methods & Research 28: 387-424.
Mahoney, James. 1999. “Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in Macrocausal
analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 1154-1196.
Bradshaw, York and Michael Wallace. 1991. “Informing Generality and Explaining
Uniqueness: The Place of Case Studies in Comparative Research.” International Journal
of Comparative Sociology 32: 154-171.
Timothy J. McKeown. 1999. “Case Studies and the Statistical Worldview.” International
Organization 53: 161-190.
Yin, Robert K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA :
Sage Publications.
Recommended:
Ragin, Charles C. 1997. “Turning the Tables: How Case-Oriented Research Challenges
Variable Oriented Research.” Comparative Social Research 16: 27-42.
George, Alexander, and Bennett, Andrew. 2005. Cast Studies and Theory Development in
the Social Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Monday, Feb. 20
Feb. 22
SECOND PAPER DUE BY EMAIL AT 5PM
Week 7. Concept formation and stretching
King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, 23-27, 151-155.
Sartori, Giovanni. 1970. “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics.” American
Political Science Review 64: 1033-1053.
Hirschman, Albert O. 1985. “Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating
some Categories of Economic Discourse.” Economics and Philosophy 1: 7-21.
Adcock, Robert and David Collier. 2001. “Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for
Qualitative and Quantitative Research,” APSR 95: 529-546.
Munck, Gerardo L. and Jay Verkuilen. 2002. “Conceptualizing and Measuring
Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices.” Comparative Political Studies: 35-39.
(Includes response by Michael Coppedge).
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Recommended:
Gerring, Social Science Methodology, ch. 3.
March 1
Winter Break—No Class
Monday, Mar. 6
THIRD PAPER DUE BY EMAIL AT 5PM
Evidence: More Direct Interrogation Instead of Distant Proxies (Applications and
Evaluation)
Mar. 8
Week 8. Agents, Decisions, and Intentions: Elite Interviews and
Documents
Janis, Irving L., and L. Mann. 1976. Decision-Making. Riverside, NJ: Free Press.
George, Alexander, and Timothy McKeown. 1985. “Case Studies and Theories of
Organizational Decision Making,” Advances in Information Processing in Organizations
(JAI Press).
“Symposium: Interview Methods in Political Science.” 2002. Political Science and
Politics 35: 663-688.
Luker, Kristin. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of
California Press: chapters 7-8.
Mar. 15
Week 9. Structures and Constraints: Content Analysis and Archival
Data
Lustick, Ian. 1996. “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical
Records and the Problem of Selection Bias,” APSR 90: 605-18.
Collier, David. 1999. “Data, Field Work, and Extracting New Ideas at Close Range,”
APSA –Comparative Politics Newsletter (Winter): 1-6.
Thies, Cameron. 19XX. “A Pragmatic Guide to Qualitative Historical Analysis in the
Study of International Relations.” International Studies Perspectives 3: 351-372.
Petersen, Roger. 1999. “Mechanisms and Structures in Comparison.” In J. Bowen and
Roger Petersen, eds. Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Griffin, Larry. 1993. “Narrative, Event-Structure Analysis, and Causal Interpretation.”
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American Journal of Sociology 8: 1094-1133.
chapters of Dan Carpenter’s The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy
Mar. 22
Week 10. Processes and Interpretation: Participant Observation and
Ethnography
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”
In Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books: 3-30.
Schwartz, Joel. 1984. “Participation and Multisubjective Understanding; An Interpretivist
Approach to the Study of Political Participation.” Journal of Politics: 1117-1141.
Laitin, David. 1986. Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the
Yoruba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Taylor, Michael. 1989. “Structure, Culture, and Action.” Politics & Society 17:115-162
Rabinow, Paul, and William M. Sullivan. 1987. “The Interpretive Turn: A Second Look.”
In Rabinow and Sullivan, eds. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look. Berkeley:
University of California Press: 1-30.
John Dunn. 1979. “Practicing History and Social Science on ‘Realist’ Assumptions.” In
C. Hookway and P. Pettit, eds. Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the
Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 145-175.
chapters from Fred Schaffer, Democracy in Translation or Michael Jones-Correa,
Between Two Nations.
Monday, Mar. 27
Mar. 29
FOURTH PAPER DUE BY EMAIL AT 5PM
Week 11. Counterfactuals
Lebow, Richard Ned. 1999. “What’s So Different About a Counterfactual?” World
Politics: 550-85.
Fearon, James D. 1991. “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science.”
World Politics 43: 169-195.
Weingast, Barry R. 1996. “Off-the-Path Behavior: A Game-Theoretic Approach to
Counterfactuals and Its Implications for Political and Historical Analysis.” In Philip E.
Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds. Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Kiser, Edgar and Levi, Margaret. 1996. “Using Counterfactuals in Historical Analysis.”
In Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds. Counterfactual Thought Experiments in
World Politics. Princeton University Press: 187-210.
April 5
Week 12: Dynamic Processes and Mechanisms
Tilly, Charles. 2001. “Mechanisms in Political Processes.” Annual Review of Political
Science 4: 21-41.
Kuran, Timor. 1989. “Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political
Revolution.” Public Choice 61: 41-74.
Abbott, Andrew. 1997. “On the Concept of a Turning Point.” Comparative Social
Research 16: 85-105.
Goldstone, Jack. 1998. “Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence, and
Explanation in Historical Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 829-845.
Schelling, Thomas. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: W.W. Norton.
Chapter 4.
Chwe, Michael. 2001. Rational Ritual. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 3-18.
Lohmann, Susanne. 1994. “Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday
Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-1991.” World Politics 47: 42-101.
Apr. 12
Week 13: Temporality and Sequencing
Pierson, Paul. 2001. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, And the Study of Politics.”
American Political Science Review 94: 251-267.
Page, Scott. 2005. “An Essay on the Existence, Types, and Causes of Path Dependence.”
Quarterly Journal of Political Science 1: xx-xx.
Mahoney, James. 2000. “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society
29: 507-548.
Haydu, Jeffrey. 1998. “Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and
as Sequences of Problem Solving.” American Journal of Sociology.
Sewell, William H., Jr.. 1996. “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology.” In
Terrence J. McDonald, ed. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of
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Chicago Press. Pages TBA.
Bendix, Reinhard. 1978. Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Pages TBA.
Monday, Apr. 17
Apr. 19
FIFTH PAPER DUE BY EMAIL AT 5PM
Week 14: Macro-Historical Analysis
Mahoney, James. 2003. “Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical
Analysis.” In James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. Comparative Historical
Analysis in the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation. Chapters 1-3.
Lukes, Steven. 2001. “Methodological individualism reconsidered.” In Michael Martin
and Lee McIntyre, eds., Readings in The Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Skocpol, Theda and Margaret Somers. 1980. “The Uses of Comparative History in
Macrosocial Inquiry.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2: 174-97.
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and John D. Stephens. 1997. “Comparing Historical Sequences:
A Powerful Tool for Causal Analysis.” Comparative Social Research 16: 55-72.
Paige, Jeffrey M. 1999. “Conjuncture, Comparison, and Conditional Theory in
Macrosociological Inquiry.” American Journal of Sociology 105: 781-800.
Recommended:
Roberts, Clayton. 1996. The Logic of Historical Explanation. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
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