Epistemology and Methods
Research Questions,
Puzzles and the Study of Causation
April 21 2009
Research Design
Reminder:
• Positivist Epistemology
• Explaining vs. understanding
• Planning your research (check list)
• Examples from IR, comparative politics, European integration,
IPE (“personal” selection bias)
• Pluralism of methods (more an qualitative research)
• 3 sessions on research design preparation and 3 sessions on
methods…
How to get started: research topic
Choosing a research topic
• KKV approach (ambitious…)
• Choose a hypothesis seen as important in the literature, but
where a systematic study lacks (lack of sufficient testing)
• Choose a hypothesis, we suspect is false and investigate this…
• Provide (“resolve”) further evidence in an ongoing debate
• Design research to illuminate unquestioned assumptions in the
literature
• Or a topic has been overlooked (KKV, 16-17)
How to get started: research topic
There is no methodological or instrumental way to search
for a research topic (Geddes, chapter 2)
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KKV+ (Emotions at this stage are important…)
Curiosity, fascination, intuition, irritation, obsession…
“why some event or process has happened”
Creativity: “Good scholarship arises from the interaction of
observation and conjecture”
How to get started: research topic
• “Students cannot develop an autonomous reaction to the world
by constantly worrying about what others think. They must
worry about what they think themselves, and make sure they
think something…”
• The role of “mentors” and peers/other students...
A researcher‘s hope: finding „puzzles“
• … searching for a puzzle…
• “What puzzles you?”
• “pieces of information, the belief that the pieces fit together
into a meaningful picture – but the inability to fit the pieces
together initially”
• Given existing literature / dominant explanation, what you
observe seems not to correspond with what is predicted…
• Intuition…
Puzzle-driven approach
• Example of a puzzle
• Background:
 The role of the Secretariat in assisting negotiations
 The negotiation agent lost influence over time (variance)
 Leading explanations are not satisfactory
☛ the puzzle of missing delegation
Puzzle-driven approach
• Functional Principal-Agent literature: Rational explanations
for delegation (Hawkins et al. 2006, Martin 2006): We should
observe that states favour delegation…
 …when they lack international influence
 …when states are dissatisfied with the status quo
 …when preferences among states diverge
 …when staff and states have similar preferences
Alternative explanations (power argument, legalization
argument)
New explanation (delegation incentives within IOs)
Other ways to find a research question
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Beyond puzzles, you can contribute by:
Theory-testing vs. theory-building:
Assessing competing explanations as to observed outcomes
Assessing competing explanations as to observed processes
and causal mechanisms
• Investigate new topics where little literature is available
• Assess the conditions under which certain dominant
explanations hold..
Preconditions!
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Knowing the facts and thinking with help of models
Create your “own data-set”
Factual knowledge
Theoretical knowledge (and use of “models”)
A model as a simplified representation of a process (e.g.
collective action problem)
• Mancur Olson’s model of political mobilization
• Play with models and implications
Models…
• Negotiations (two-level game, veto player model, Schelling’s
paradox, BATNA)
• Cooperation (coordination and collaboration games,
hegemony)
• IOs (delegation: time-inconsistency problems; behavior:
socialization, agency slack)
• Policy processes (historical institutionalism (path dependency,
conjunctures); diffusion processes (imitation, learning,
competition, coercion))
Research questions
• From grand theories to middle-range theories
• From romantic topics towards digestible questions
• Be aware of the rush-to-publish syndrome (absence of
outcome)
• Think about data gathering and research methods early on
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One last thing:
Settle on one research question (at max. two!)
“What explains…”
“Under what conditions…”
Causation
• At the heart of social inquiry: causation – explanation…
• Cause: Events or conditions that raise the probability of
some outcome occurring (under ceteris paribus conditions)
(Gerring 2005)
• Mostly used logics:
• Deterministic causal arguments (necessary or sufficient) vs.
probabilistic causal arguments (likelihood)
• Causal effects (correlational account) vs. causal mechanisms
Causation
• There are multiple forms of causation!
• Generally:
• Direct causation: A causes B
• Reverse causation: B causes A
• Reciprocal causation: A causes B and B causes A
Varieties of Causation
• Causal equifinality (several causes act independently of each
to produce, each on its own, a particular effect)
• Conjunctural cause (a particular combination of causes
acting together to produce a given outcome)
Skopcol’s Theory of Social Revolution
(Goertz and Mahoney 2004)
Varieties of Causation
• Non-linear cause (cause with takeoff or threshold level)
• Constant cause (cause operating continuously over a period
of time)
• Causal chain: many intermediate causes
• Critical juncture / path-dependent cause (cause at a
particular time with enduring effects)
Research Design Paper
• Research topic and research question (motivation and your
contribution)
• Short literature review (dominating explanations)
• Definition of concepts, listing of key variables (outcome
variable and explanatory variables), potential explanations
how these variables are interacting, expected observations
based on (competing) hypotheses
• Discussion as to how methods could be used and how you plan
to gather the data
Deadline: 9 June, 6pm, word count (2500 +/- 10%)