Theorization and Causality PDF

4 Theorization and Causality Cathie Jo Martin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 Introduction...

4 Theorization and Causality Cathie Jo Martin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 Introduction Qualitative research requires being a good listener. You ask your sources—​people or texts—​ to tell you their stories. You listen quietly to understand their truths. The process is not so much about mastery and imposing one’s will on the narrative; rather, the object is to grasp the realities—​cognitive frames, motivations, and perceived constraints—​of the protagonists. With attention, care, and active listening to sources, qualitative research helps us to create theories about political problems and processes. It helps us (1) to define research questions and theory, (2) to identify causal mechanisms and propose hypotheses, and (3) to evaluate how these causal factors operate and whether they operate as expected. These research activi- ties contribute to more realistic and robust theories about the workings of the political world. Allow me to illustrate this by example, one drawn from personal experience. I have re- cently journeyed into the long 19th century in Denmark and Britain to understand early, path-​defining choices in education system development. Denmark, a small, agricultural country on the periphery of Europe, created the second-​earliest, mass public education system in the world in 1814. Britain, leader of the industrial revolution, left schooling to church societies until 1870, when a public system was finally put into place. Agricultural Denmark developed expansive vocational education programs for workers as part of its sec- ondary education system reforms in 1892 and 1903; industrial Britain chose to limit sec- ondary education to humanistic studies for elites in 1902.1 Scholars offer many excellent (albeit somewhat contradictory) theories about education system development having to do with state-​building, industrialization, and conflict between the church and state. I suspected, however, that cultural differences underlay these battles over education and that cultural assumptions influenced the goals of and ideas about reform, the interests of the antagonists, and the institutional rules of the game. This required me to seek out and listen to firsthand accounts that illustrated cultural differences and to comprehend how policymakers and the chattering classes viewed schools, the working classes, society, and state. For this, I turned to the experts in cultural production—​historical fiction writers—​and investigated cultural depictions of education. This process entailed contemplating the stories in their nov- els, reading their letters in archives, and using computational linguistics methods to analyze their words.2 This chapter uses this illustration as a running example of how qualitative methods help us to perform important tasks of research, from design and theoretical development to assess- ments of causality. And while research designs may require employing a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods (for more, see Chapter 7), scholars keen on rigorous explanation of social, political, and economic phenomena may leverage the unique strengths and opportu- nities offered by a qualitative approach. Cathie Jo Martin, Theorization and Causality In: Doing Good Qualitative Research. Edited by: Jennifer Cyr and Sara Wallace Goodman, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197633137.003.0004 38 Cathie Jo Martin Defining Terms At the outset, we should define a few terms, such as “theory development,” “hypothesis,” and “causal mechanism.” Maybe you have heard these terms, or maybe this is your introduction to them, so let us consider what these terms mean, what they do in a research project, and why qualitative methods are uniquely positioned to carry out these tasks. Eckstein defines “theory” as a “mental construct that orders phenomena or inquiry.”3 Theoretical constructs may take many forms; for example, classificatory schema that sort Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 phenomena have a different purpose from analytic arguments positing causal relationships among phenomena, yet both suggest stylized patterns between empirical observations. A “hypothesis” is derived from a theory and predicts a relationship between variables that may be generalized to a broad set of cases. Hypotheses provide a bridge between theory and empirical phenomena, as they are “operationalized” in a way that makes them observable in the empirical world. Hypotheses are falsifiable, in the sense that one may evaluate evidence in order to determine whether hypotheses correctly predict relationships.4 For example, power resources theory suggests that high levels of welfare state provision develop in societies with a strong working class. One specific hypothesis is that countries with high levels of unioni- zation are more likely to develop expansive unemployment benefits than countries with low levels of unionization.5 A “causal mechanism” provides an account of how a factor has its intended effect. For ex- ample, Thelen suggests that a process of conversion may underlie processes of incremental institutional change in vocational training programs. Even when the programs on the surface remain largely intact, they may lose their capacities to provide skills to marginal workers. Competing factions struggle to gain control over the programs, and in this way the programs are converted to new purposes.6 Thus, causal mechanisms constitute the black box of cause and effect. If a hypothesis suggests that factor A causes phenomenon B, the causal mech- anism specifies how this is done. The Uses of Qualitative Research to Explain Political Outcomes Constructing Theory Qualitative research helps us to shed light on political outcomes in several ways. First, qual- itative research helps us to develop theory: to identify the research question, the parameters of a problem, and the likely factors contributing to its resolution. The process of theory devel- opment entails using specific observations to posit broader patterned relationships among phenomena. Scholars consider alternative narratives about how phenomena interact in spe- cific cases; they then theorize more enduring relationships among these phenomena.7 The process is inductive, as we often stumble on compelling narratives that seem true to broader experience.8 Bates suggests that the “soak and poke” phase of research requires immersion in the local culture and the intuition to let the facts speak for themselves. Inductive data-​ gathering helps one to move outside of the deep tracks of existing debates and eases the discovery of missing or underexplored factors in the empirical story.9 Although inductive  Theorization and Causality 39 investigations may sometimes feel like wandering in the wilderness, we may avoid premature theories that close down alternative lines of research. Bates describes his own process of growing awareness in his search to understand why farmers in East Africa failed to grow as much coffee as they were able to produce. His in- itial insights about coffee producers gradually developed into a theory about government interventions. While Bates was initially drawn to a cultural argument, he came to realize that farmers’ fears about additional taxation partly drove their reticence to produce more. He then recognized a relationship between changing fiscal policies and variations in production; Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 building on this realization, he articulated a cross-​national, comparative theory about the relationship between state policies and the strategic choices of coffee producers. The cross-​ national comparison led him to consider how variations in government types—​and partic- ularly in levels of authoritarianism and party systems—​affected fiscal policies and farmers’ strategies.10 His inductive and intuition-​driven research gave him the freedom to find unex- pected factors in his stories about economic choices and political change. My research on the early development of education systems exemplifies how qualitative re- search may be used to define the research problem. Other authors have convincingly argued that cross-​national variations in education system development reflect state-​building, class struggle, and differences in church-​state relations.11 Yet by lingering with the literature of the 18th and early 19th centuries, I discovered a meaningful cross-​national difference in the overarching goals of education, and I surmised that these differences in goals also had an im- pact on education system trajectories. British and Danish authors held to vastly different cultural views of educational goals: Danish writers sought education reforms to strengthen society; British authors fa- vored education to nurture individual self-​development. Danish bureaucrats and authors drew strong connections among education, economic growth, and social stability; they offered this package deal as a formula to build a strong society. The father of Danish litera- ture, Ludvig Holberg, laid out the logic of how education contributed to a well-​ordered so- ciety in his 1741 international best-​seller, Niels Klim’s Journey under the Earth (which was written in Latin). Niels Klim travels to the subterranean utopia of Pontu, where schools en- able each citizen to acquire skills to contribute to society: “[S]‌tudents are employed in solv- ing complicated and difficult questions.... No one studies more than one science, and thus each gets a full knowledge of his peculiar subject.”12 Similarly, poet-​priest Nicholai Frederik Severin Grundtvig believed that peasants should be both literate and educated about Danish history in order to participate fully in Danish society.13 For British authors, education was a means to perfect the individual and to contribute to self-​actualization (largely for the upper and middle classes). British contemporaries of Holberg barely mention education, other than to ridicule the stereotypical bumbling tutor; thus, Daniel Defoe’s protagonist in Robinson Crusoe (1719) readily admits that formal schooling holds no allure; only on the desert island does he learn to create products, but without the benefits of skills training.14 Samuel Taylor Coleridge later frames learning as a path for individual self-​discovery: he warns that “a man... unblest with a liberal education, should act without attention to the habits, and feelings, of his fellow citizens”; education fa- mously stimulates the heart to love.15 Matthew Arnold explains, “The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.”16 40 Cathie Jo Martin One’s “raw materials” may not be literature, but this example illustrates how research ques- tions can come out of qualitative research (see Chapter 2), drive a researcher to new sources of data (see Chapter 13), and enable maximally inductive, curious exploration of outcomes—​ institutional and behavioral alike. As in this case, a qualitative research project may point to or open up a new source of data. For example, political scientists typically do not work with literature, but fiction provides an excellent source for assessing historical, cross-​national differences in cultural attitudes and public opinion (or at least views of the bourgeois intelli- gentsia). Fiction allows us to understand respondents’ thought processes in real time and to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 avoid reading history backward.17 Identifying Causal Mechanisms Second, qualitative research helps us to identify hypotheses and to elaborate the causal mechanisms that underlie theoretical predictions about relationships among phenomena. Qualitative research helps to advance our collective understanding of political issues by unveiling theoretical gaps in extant work that stem from understudied or poorly under- stood causal mechanisms. Qualitative research uniquely contributes to theory-​building by demonstrating the mechanisms by which variables operate. Large-​N quantitative studies may verify strong correlations among factors, but we cannot always be certain that these correlations accurately capture causal relationships, and the findings cannot show defin- itively that the model driving the quantitative tests is correct. Even if a statistical model sets forth the explanatory factors that matter, it is less well suited for identifying the rea- sons why they matter. Causal inference cannot be assumed from observational data; these data simply do not provide sufficient information about processes to justify causal claims.18 Articulating concepts is a crucial component of research design; however, this stage is often neglected in research methods. Moreover, qualitative observations may be used to refine hypotheses, as scholars glean expanding insights into the nature of political phenomena.19 Thus, qualitative research is an important tool for strengthening the validity of causal inference.20 For example, while cultural influences are often cited in political science, the mechanisms by which cultural factors have bearing on political phenomena are less well established. The lack of precise descriptions of causal mechanisms was particularly problematic in cultural claims about the superiority of American political institutions, especially because these claims were associated with a distinct international political agenda.21 In recent decades, scholars have used survey research to assess cross-​national distinctions in cultural values, and these more objective and less value-​laden approaches have contributed much to our un- derstanding of cross-​national differences in religious values and comparative attitudes to- ward the welfare state and more.22 Yet big-​N studies of public opinion do not capture the full complexity of how public opinion matters to political outcomes or why altering words in opinion surveys may change respondents’ answers. Qualitative research offers a means for exploring cultural views in a more intimate fashion; in particular, literature offers us a relatively autonomous venue for soaking and poking in the worldviews of centuries past. The qualitative study of literature enables us to listen to the data in an inductive fashion and to avoid interviewer error that may occur when posing questions to respondents. In this way, we may use qualitative data to refine our theoretical hypotheses.  Theorization and Causality 41 Qualitative research also may uncover omitted and missing variables that are critical to a story, and that may even set the context for the operation of the causal mechanisms. Falleti and Lynch refer to this as the “context conditionality” of causal mechanisms, where contex- tual factors mediate the mechanisms by which a cause has an effect.23 My work shows how the neglected variable of culture provides context for the operation of another variable, working-​class power. Scholars widely accept that working-​class power contributes to social reforms, including the educational attainment of the working class.24 Yet the specific relationship is a bit unclear, as scholars hold different views of how norms of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 cooperation and conflict enter into this process. Some authors suggest that countries with the most militant unions developed extensive welfare state benefits because well-​organized labor wrested concessions from the capitalist class.25 Others believe that social benefits were more likely to develop in countries with strong historical norms of cooperation and muted class antagonisms.26 I find that culture provides the context for the exercise of power of organized labor and for the content of elite and working-​class demands. At least as early as the 1700s, British and Danish authors presented radically different views of farmers and workers. The cultural tropes wielded by literary writers stipulate the context for the class struggles and compro- mises that shaped trajectories of education, social, and labor policies. British authors, for example, were largely suspicious of the working man. During the French Revolution, many intellectuals feared that working-​class literacy would be accom- panied by social instability.27 For Thomas Malthus, the working class constituted a drag on the British economy, because population would increase with a rise in the means of sub- sistence.28 Victorian British social reformers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell deplored class injustices and were sympathetic to the plight of the poor, yet even they worried about Malthusian overpopulation and the culture of poverty afflicting workers.29 Gaskell drew unions as fatally flawed institutions that contributed to workers’ misery: “[O]‌nce banded together, yo’ve no more pity for a man than a wild hunger-​maddened wolf.”30 George Gissing stressed the cruelty of the urban poor in The Netherworld, as when he wrote about one character, “[T]his lust of hers for sanguinary domination was the natural enough issue of the brutalizing serfdom of her predecessors in the family line.”31 The Fabian socialist H. G. Wells feared cultural degradation associated with mass culture and described the “extrava- gant swarm of new births” as the “essential disaster of the nineteenth century.”32 Danish authors held to a significantly more positive view of the “small people” than did British writers: they considered industrialization to be an important collective project and sought education of workers to further collective goals of building society, national strength, and economic prosperity. Unlike in Malthusian Britain, farmers and workers were celebrated as the backbone of Danish society at the dawn of the 19th century; educated workers were viewed as essential to cultivating useful citizens for the nation-​building and the industri- alizing projects. In Montanus den Yngre, Thomasine Gyllembourg connected social soli- darity and investment in workers’ skills to economic productivity and industrialization. Her forward-​thinking protagonist wrote a treatise on foreign technology, connected prosperity to the freedom of working men, and argued for skills training to offset unemployment related to mechanization.33 These strong cultural differences about labor resonated in the expression of preferences for education reform by leaders on the left in late 19th-​century Britain and Denmark. While some British authors, socialists, and labor leaders supported technical education for the 42 Cathie Jo Martin working classes, many argued for one-​track upper secondary schools so that workers would not receive a two-​tiered education. The Independent Labour Party sought universal, free sec- ular education at all levels, and Wells believed that technical education was suitable only for substandard jobs.34 Danish activists across the political spectrum sought secondary education for all as a way to build society (“sambundets udbytte”) and ascribed to a wide range of educational interventions.35 Educator and politician Vilhelm Rasmussen argued that Denmark’s greatest asset was its human resources; a good education would make young people committed to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 improving their life circumstances and would bolster cultural development and democracy. Rasmussen sought appropriate schools for students of all abilities and supported examina- tions to place students properly, as these could identify students’ innate capacities, initiative, and ingenuity.36 This example helps us to understand the role of qualitative research in articulating causal mechanisms and shedding light on how variables such as culture provide context for the in- terpretation of interests in episodes of class struggle. Without qualitative research, we might miss the crucial lesson of this story: literary depictions contribute to the characterizations of the working class in the 19th century, and these characterizations provides important con- text for understanding policy reforms. The claim is not that cultural calculations were the de- fining factor in cross-​national variations in education systems; however, the data suggest that cultural depictions delimit the possibilities of reform. In this way, qualitative observations allow us to tease out causal mechanisms and to redefine theory. Testing Causal Mechanisms Third, qualitative research helps us to evaluate claims about causal mechanisms: at this testing stage, qualitative research is particularly adept at assessing competing causal claims (when both receive support from quantitative tests) and coping with causal complexity. Process tracing methods enable us to assess conflicting arguments about processes of change and are particularly invaluable in scholarly debates that highlight contrasting causal mecha- nisms. Context becomes particularly important under conditions of multicausality, context conditionality, and endogeneity.37 Moreover, a factor may be relevant without being causal, as it may set the context for the factors that drive the outcome.38 Several types of qualitative methods allow us to assess the validity of our hypotheses and causal inference: these include process tracing, within-​case analyses, and attention to most-​ likely and least-​likely cases and looking at outliers, to name but a few.39 Qualitative process tracing allows us to track the impacts of a factor or occurrence on subsequent events (see Chapter 34); in this way, we can ensure that the observed relationship between a causal vari- able and its effect is not fallacious. Qualitative case studies are particularly rich sources in the process of identifying and ruling out causal mechanisms, because their thick descriptions provide narratives about how phenomena interact.40 Bayesian inference is an important mechanism for assessing the validity of a causal infer- ence. This technique entails estimating uncertainty in situations and then evaluating whether the independent variables fit with the hypotheses. If one discovers an independent variable in a situation in which one does not expect to find it, or does not find an expected variable, one may reasonably question whether the variable is indeed important to the finding. This  Theorization and Causality 43 technique helps us to make inferences from a small number of observations and incorporate contextual knowledge into our analyses.41 Qualitative and quantitative approaches may be strengthened through the use of mixed methods; indeed, a good “rule of thumb” is to bring as much evidence to bear as possible (see Chapter 7). A multimethod research design combining correlational (cross-​case) and process-​level (within-​case) observations improves the estimation of causal effects.42 Yet it is important to stop and observe the difference between quantitative and qualitative meth- ods of analysis. Quantitative methods give us a general idea of relationship among explana- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 tory factors. Qualitative analyses—​comparative historical analysis, process tracing, and thick description—​offer novel tools for identifying and following causal mechanisms. My study of education reform relies on both qualitative and quantitative data to develop hypotheses about the role of culture in cross-​national differences in education system de- velopment. I use quantitative data to observe long-​term differences in British and Danish corpora of literature to document cross-​national distinctions in views toward education. Computational text analyses allow one to test systematically observable differences in the frequencies of words in corpora of British (622) and Danish (521) novels, poems, and plays between 1700 and 1920 (after which copyright laws limit access). I hypothesize that if coun- tries have distinctive cultural narratives, these should be readily apparent in their large na- tional corpora of literature, should exhibit sharp cross-​national differences, and should persist for generations or even centuries. I use both supervised and unsupervised learning models to compare word frequencies and topics across countries. (For more on these meth- ods, see Chapter 32.) The analysis finds statistically significant differences between Danish and British corpora over two centuries, as cultural depictions of society, individuals, the working class, and the state in literary references to education differ wildly in the two coun- tries (Figure 4.1). But this evidence establishes only a correlation or a pattern in the relationship be- tween cultural depictions of education and trajectories of education system development. Therefore, I complement this large-​N finding with qualitative research to tease out why the Word Frequency as Percentage of Total Words per Period 1.0 0.8 Word Frequency 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 1720–1770 1770–1820 1820–1870 1870–1920 Britain Denmark Figure 4.1 Frequency of Society Words in Education Snippets (Goals of Public System). Words are England, English, Britain, country, folk, people, collective, communal, custom, social, mutual. 44 Cathie Jo Martin observed pattern exists and how this comes to be. I obtain my qualitative observations with a close reading of texts and archival material to explore precisely what authors think about education and how they become involved in specific struggles over education reform. A close reading of texts, such as the authors cited above, shows that British and Danish authors think about education in the ways suggested by the quantitative data. (See Chapter 30 for a further discussion of these methods.) Furthermore, with archival investigations, I can place authors at the scene of the crime. As it turns out, writers were extremely important but undervalued political actors in reform Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, as they provided a venue for transmitting views of the (largely middle-​class) people up to state rulers in predemocratic regimes.43 Authors had a comparative advantage in framing policy problems. Thus, Benjamin Disraeli admits that he wrote Sybil (1844) to draw attention to dysfunctional party politics and to the troubles of the working man.44 Writers made emotional appeals to readers, and their depictions of heroes and villains helped to politicize or demobilize aggrieved groups. Rudyard Kipling recognizes the power of the national corpus when he writes, “The magic of Literature lies in the words, and not in any man.... [A]‌bare half-​hundred words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago, can still lead whole nations into and out of captivity.”45 Authors also placed an explicit role providing legitimacy to political movements, and they explicitly they used their works to mobilize elite and popular opinion in support of particular political agendas. For example, Danish authors formed a faction of the Left Party in the late 19th century and joined forces with the farmers’ wing of the party to struggle for political change. Christian Berg, the head of the farmer’s wing, viewed the authors as making a huge contribution to the Left Party cause. According to Berg, the authors’ Literary Left faction allowed the party to wage “war with culture” instead of with more materialistic means. The authors constituted “our poets, our professors, our jurists, journalists.... Like manna from heaven, the literary Left came down into this desert.... [W]‌e had what we lacked.”46 The combination of quantitative text analysis, a close reading of texts, and process tracing of authors’ involvement with education reform struggles provides considerable evidence in support of the causal claim that nationally specific views about education set the context for educational system outcomes. Authors were not the most significant agents of change, yet they played specific and recognized roles in providing ideology for the movements. Qualitative and quantitative evidence work together here to verify cross-​national differences in cultural depictions of political problems and demonstrate their correspondence with cross-​national variations in institutional solutions. The process by which I arrived at these insights also exemplifies the joy of revelation often produced by qualitative research. Reading novels made me aware of stark cultural differences and brought me to look more closely at authors as political actors; in the process, I discovered an arena of political action that I hitherto knew little about and that has been largely over- looked in our field. Pitfalls and Drawbacks All this is not to say that qualitative research does not have drawbacks—​it does! For one thing, scholars who do qualitative research report having difficulty getting their work ac- cepted by leading political science journals. Scholars may face a high hurdle in convincing  Theorization and Causality 45 editors and reviewers that a qualitative approach has merit, particularly when one looks be- yond traditional variables such as interests and institutions. Yet a careful and explicit presen- tation of methods is a scholar’s best friend in such endeavors, and mixed methods also help to overcome this hurdle. Qualitative case studies are also limited in their generalizability, although strategies such as within-​case analyses and attention to most-​likely and least-​likely cases can help to offset the problems posed by a small N. My solution to this problem is to utilize a blend of quali- tative and quantitative methods and to be very clear about what each approach offers to the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 study of institutional and policy change. Quantitative text analysis allows me to identify em- pirical patterns in large corpora of literature over time. We may assess—​from the proverbial bird’s eye view—​how authors over generations collectively work with nationally distinctive structures of symbols and narratives in their literary works. Authors inherit symbols and narratives from their literary ancestors, rework and apply these cultural tropes to the issues of the day, and pass along collective truths of their national corpora to future generations.47 Qualitative analyses—​a close reading of texts and process tracing using primary and sec- ondary sources—​allows me to identify causal mechanisms and further test my hypotheses. With qualitative text analyses, we can discover how authors thought about education in real time and trace how authors became activists in political struggles over education reform. Both tasks are important, yet at the end of the day, qualitative methods are necessary to grasp actors’ motivations and experiences. Adventures in Qualitative Research Qualitative research methods provide a powerful tool for theorizing political puzzles and for navigating the maze of meaning through which protagonists and antagonists travel toward their policy accords. Before we can test hypotheses (using either qualitative or quantitative methods), we must construct plausible stories about the who, what, when, where, and how of politics. Qualitative research helps us to formulate research questions that are consistent with the worldviews of the actors involved. Qualitative research offers insights into the dy- namics of causal processes and the specific ways that causal variables have their intended effect. Finally, qualitative research helps us to test hypotheses and provides a reality check about the validity of suggested causal mechanisms. Capturing the meaning underlying causal processes may be particularly important in our contemporary world, when vicious culture wars inform material interests, define class cleav- ages, and rip apart democratic institutions. Political science as an exercise in prediction and explication—​whether applied to election outcomes, public opinion polls, or social move- ment uprisings—​seems to be an increasingly futile undertaking. Culture is more frequently the stuff that politics is made of, and only by listening closely to the cries and whispers of the mobilized masses can we hope to make sense of this topsy-​turvy world. Notes 1. Gjerløff and Jacobsen, Da skolen bliv sat I system; Green, Education and State Formation. 2. Martin, “Imagine All the People”; Martin, Education for All. 3. Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” 125. 46 Cathie Jo Martin 4. Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” 125. 5. Korpi, “Social Policy and Distributional Conflict in the Capitalist Democracies,” 298. 6. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, 7–​8; Palier and Thelen, “Institutionalizing Dualism,” 119–​120. 7. Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” 125. 8. Laitin, “Comparative Politics,” 631. 9. Bates, “From Case Studies to Social Science,” 178. 10. Bates, “From Case Studies to Social Science,” 178–​180. 11. Ansell and Lindvall, “The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems,” 505–​506. 12. Holberg, Niels Klim’s Journey under the Ground, 491. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 13. Grundtvig, “Skolen for Livet og akademiet i Soer.” 14. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 4. 15. Coleridge, “The Watchman,” 128. 16. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 46. 17. Ahmed, “Reading History Forward,” 1059. 18. Collier and Brady, Rethinking Social Inquiry. 19. Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?,” 348; Thomas, “The Qualitative Foundations of Political Science Methodology.” 20. Collier and Brady, Rethinking Social Inquiry. 21. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations. 22. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular; Svallfors, “Worlds of Welfare and Attitudes to Redistribution.” 23. Falleti and Lynch; “Context and Causal Mechanisms in Political Analysis,” 1143. 24. Stephens, The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism; Korpi, “Social Policy and Distributional Conflict in the Capitalist Democracies.” 25. Lipset, “Radicalism or Reformism,” 1–​2. 26. Cusack, Iversen, and Soskice, “Economic Interests and the Origins of Electoral Systems”; Martin and Swank, The Political Construction of Business Interests; Martin, Nijhuis, and Olsson, “Cultural Images of Labor Conflict and Cooperation.” 27. Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson. 28. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 27–​28. 29. Steinlight, Populating the Novel. 30. Gaskell, Mary Barton, 180. 31. Gissing, The Essential George Gissing, Loc 95. 32. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1. 33. Gyllembourg, Montanus den Yngre. 34. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 93. 35. Skovgaard-​Petersen, Dannelse og Demokrati, 178, 138. 36. Nørr, Det Højere skolevæsen og kirken, 197–​198. 37. Denk and Lehtinen, “Contextual Analyses with QCA-​Methods.” 38. Mahoney and Goertz, “Tale of Two Cultures.” 39. Collier and Brady, Rethinking Social Inquiry. 40. Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?,” 350. 41. Collier and Brady, Rethinking Social Inquiry; Fearon, “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” 173. 42. Beland and Cox, “Introduction,” 6; Humphreys and Jacobs, “Mixing Methods,” 653. 43. Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s, 29–​33. 44. Disraeli, Sybil, 454. 45. Kipling, Book of Words, 6. 46. Hvidt, Edvard Brandes, 127–​128. 47. Martin and Chevalier, “What We Talk About,” 809; Martin, Education for All; Williams, Culture and Society.  Theorization and Causality 47 Recommended Readings Maxwell, Joseph A. “Why qualitative methods are necessary for generalization.” Qualitative Psychology 8.1 (2021): 111. Psychologist Joseph Maxwell distinguishes between internal generalization (which extends observed findings to others within the group or population) and external generalization (which applies insights to other settings, groups or populations). Sampling is more important to internal than to external generalization, Qualitative methods are particularly important to external gen- eralization, because these help us to view the mental constructs and context that make observed Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/56278/chapter/445214149 by MediSurf user on 22 October 2024 causal processes transferable to other settings. Skarbek, David. “Qualitative research methods for institutional analysis.” Journal of Institutional Economics 16.4 (2020): 409–422. Political scientist David Skarbek investigates how economists study institutions with qualitative methods and applies these insights to his own investigations into criminal organizations. 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