Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: The articles by Kees van Kersbergen and Daniele Caramani constitute an impressive joint plea in favour of descriptive analyses within comparative politics. They also warn, less convincingly, against an alleged obsession of the discipline with variation that, according to them, does not do justice to the similarity of many cases. This response demonstrates that limiting the analysis to similar cases creates the risk of engaging in the hapless exercise of explaining the constant. Augmenting the role of description without simultaneously advancing sound theoretical models furthermore leads to theory-free data mining exercises. I argue that all empirically oriented fields in political science could profit from what I call ‘causal description’ and hence the in-depth univariate analysis of the dependent variable.
Source: European Political Science
DOI: 10.1057/eps.2009.49
Author: Gerald Schneider
Institution: University of Konstanz
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2006773048