GV467

Interpretation: Clifford Geertz

"As interworked systems of construable signs ...culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly--that is, thickly--described."(13) 1. Culture, in other words, is the background knowledge needed to give adequate interpretations in some context 2. Note that Geertz much less concerned with causal theory than Weber

But: ethnicity doesn't seem to be going anywhere!

"Castes ... which were to be dissolved by the effects of industrialization, have not yet been so. Instead, they seem ... to have been reincarnated in a modern form as the caste association." - Lloyd I. Rudolph, "The Modernity of Tradition: The Democratic Incarnation of Caste in India." Note: very naive notion on Varshney's part about ethnicity e.g. caste system being reinforced by political system in throes of industrialization. Scholars in 1970s trying to figure out how to rework modernization theory in light of this fact.

Elinor Ostrom: Political Scientist, 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics 2

"Common pool resources" 1. Versus game theory 2. People make up the rules: Ostrom says people make up the rules that govern the world. You have to modifiy assumption about the games and go look at the world. 3. Rely on rationality, but also trust, reciprocity

Elinor Ostrom: Political Scientist, 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics 1

"Common pool resources": game theory influential in explaining this problem, but it doesn't explain everything

I. Precursors of comparative politics

"Developmental histories"

Modernising effects of transition to capitalism 1

"In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations."

Measuring substantive significance: what counts as a big effect? 1

"Standard deviation" is a mathematical measure of dispersion - how much members of set of numbers deviate from the average

I. Comparative political economy

"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." --William Faulkner That is to say, in order to understand comparative politics today, need to understand the history of comparative politics. Same goes for effect of history on economic institutions.

A view on progress in comparative politics 3

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": the main danger is when progress is fetishized a la Green and Gerber

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

"[Lenin said in 1922] 'History knows transformations of all sorts. To rely upon conviction, devotion and other excellent spiritual qualities—that is not to be taken seriously in politics.' Being determines consciousness. During the last fifteen years, the government has changed its social composition even more deeply than its ideas. Since of all the strata of Soviet society the bureaucracy has best solved its own social problem, and is fully content with the existing situation, it has ceased to offer any subjective guarantee whatever of the socialist direction of its policy."

Facebook Post Showing Trump's Charisma

...she asked, "Really, what has Trump done?" I said, "In June of last year, Trump entered the race for president. In just a little over a year, Trump has single handedly defeated the Republican party. He did so thoroughly. In fact, he did so in such a resounding way that the Republican Party now suffers from an identity crisis. He literally dismantled the party. Trump even dismantled and dismissed the brand and value of the Bush family. ...Trump has Obama petrified that Trump will dismiss programs that weren't properly installed using proper law. ...Trump has single handedly debunked and disemboweled any value of news media as we knew it—news now suffering from an all-time level of distrust and disrespect. ...Trump has unified the silent majority in a way that should be patently frightening to "liberals." ... One man has done all of this in one year—one guy, and on his own dime. ... You can disrespect America all you want. But, it's high-time you respect the silent majority. Because they're not simply the "silent majority" as you've been trained to believe when Hillary calls them "deplorables." The fact is, they are simply the majority. And now they're no longer silent either. Donald Trump changed all of that, single-handedly and within one year.

Experimentalist absolutism: confounders unknowable

1. "Even if one correctly discerns the biases associated with all of the confounding factors one can think of, there may remain confounding factors that one has overlooked. The test of whether methodological inquiry succeeds is its ability to correctly anticipate experimental results, because experiments produce unbiased estimates regardless of whether the confounders are known or unknown." 2. Though we can easily identify confounders, experimental absolutists argue that all confounders are unknowable - this is a cop out, if ever there was one.

The covering law model to the rescue?

1. "General laws have quite analogous functions in history and in the natural sciences" 2. Explanation = preconditions + laws that logically imply outcome 3. Note: in Almond and Genco, this is called the "deductive-nomological" approach e.g. mass located in a gravitational field will fall THUS Any particular thing we're interested in can be explained once we know the relevant laws and preconditions (Shepsle) i.e. Shepsle buys this argument and gives the example of gun control with median voter theorem (MVT). MVT gives explanation for policy.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground 1

1. "H'm!" you decide. "Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage. But when all that is explained and worked out on paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist. For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and reasoning can be really calculated--because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called free will--so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it." 2. Focus on A) it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never understand, B) because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called free will

Max Weber: Legitimate authority

1. "It is usual for rulers and ruled to ground domination in rights, for the 'legitimacy' of those rights to be supported for internal reasons, and for the destruction of this belief in legitimacy to have far-reaching consequences." (TTPT, 133) 2. Weber: right to rule is grounded in legitimacy. Rulers and their subjects believe in a particular structure of domination. Weber tried to figure out why people claimed the right to rule.

Science envy

1. "Our longing for full scientific status has led us to create a kind of 'cargo cult,' fashioning cardboard imitations of the tools and products of the hard sciences in the hope that our incantations would make them real." 2. Almond & Genco, 1977 3. I.e. political scientists do the same thing

How does interpretation explain?

1. "Sociology ... is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and THEREBY with a causal explanation of its course and consequences" (E&S, 4) 2. Human psychology tractable enough for "adequate" interpretations A. Adequacy of meaning: people who do this sort of thing in this sort of context are usually acting on thus-and-such motivation

Procedural Definition of Democracy

1. "The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." (269) 2. Focus on the power to decide 3. Schumpeter going for a procedural definition of democracy 4. Definition of democracy: competitive struggle for vote is key to understanding 5. Schumpeter sees elections as giving people the power to decide

Classical Definition of Democracy

1. "The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will." (Schumpeter p. 250) 2. His classical definition: notions of common good, people and popular will are vague 3. This classical definition doesn't lead to easy assessments of nations

Another core conviction behind the design of this course:

1. "The past is never dead. It isn't even past." --William Faulkner 2. That is, debates in CP occur over and over again. Course

Topical constriction

1. "The really big social science variables—culture, economic development, ethnic heterogeneity—probably could not be manipulated even if political scientists were permitted to try. For this reason, it is commonly thought that political science can never hope to become an experimental science. And that is where the discussion of experimentation typically ends. 2. That the practical limits of experimentation impinge on scholars' theoretical aspirations is generally viewed as a shortcoming of the experimental method. It could, however, be viewed as a problem with the way political scientists select their research problems." (Green and Gerber 2003) 3. To put it differently, the obsession with experiments limits the scope of study. 4. Can't ask questions about the power of the funders of the study.

What do we do when we answer a causal question? 1

1. "Why were you late for lecture?" "The bus was much slower than usual." = 2. If the bus had travelled at its ordinary speed, I would have arrived on time. 2 is a "counterfactual conditional" (or just "counterfactual") about what would have happened in some other state of the world

Popper on reflexivity

1. "[T]he control of ourselves and of our actions by our theories ... is plastic control. We are not forced to submit ourselves to the control of our theories, for we can discuss them critically..." 2. (cited in Almond and Genco, 491)

Scott's Post-Marxist concept of resistance

1. "class resistance includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-à-vis those superordinate classes."(290) 2. "To resist a claim or an appropriation is to resist, as well, the justification and rationale behind that particular claim."(297) 3. Scott thinks focus on class is too narrow e.g. pay less than what is owed for rent. 4. I.e. Resisting a demand from a superior class = class resistance. This is a bit semantic. Nevertheless, Scott convincingly shows politics doesn't fit our conventional notions. Scott forces us to think about the bases of legitimacy. Wedeen is post-modern, a broad term.

Regimes in international context, revisited

1. 'Competitive' part of competitive authoritarianism often derives from international pressure or international templates for organisation of national authority 2. Patrimonial regimes usually dependent on resources made available via participation in international system A. natural resource exports B. benefits of international recognition of sovereignty THUS Organisational correlates of transnational legitimacy

Regimes in international context

1. 'Competitive' part of competitive authoritarianism often derives from international pressure or international templates for organisation of national authority 2. Patrimonial regimes usually dependent on resources made available via participation in international system A. natural resource exports B. benefits of international recognition of sovereignty That is to say, elections in Russia, because elections were seen as necessary for modern legitimacy.

Week 10 Readings

1. 2006 reading doesn't address issues in the 1972 or 1977 readings 2. This week is all methodological 3. Almond and Genco focus on science envy in CP

endogenous

1. A factor in a causal model or causal system whose value is determined by the states of other variables in the system 2. Internal to the case

exogenous

1. A factor in a causal model or causal system whose value is independent from the states of other variables in the system 2. External to the case

Game in extensive form

1. A lot of game theory developed during the Cold War 2. The US was trying to figure out whether to launch a preemptive strike 3. Imagine the US was the first mover. Either it did nothing and the status quo continued or it launched nukes. If launched nukes, the USSR could do nothing and lose or it could launch nukes as well, and there would be total destruction. 4. If we go to the USSR decision node, we see that the threat of total destruction is is not credible (not "subgame perfect"). 5. The USSR could, in fact, decide to do nothing, thanks to men like Stanislav Petrov.

Repeated play in game theory 1

1. A stage game is played repeatedly: Prisoner's Dilemma for Fearon and Laitin. The very last round is played the same way as an ordinary Prisoner's Dilemma, with no cooperation. Either you say game is forever, as Fearon and Laitin do, or you don't know when the game is played again. A. either indefinitely or with a specified chance of ending in any round 2. Players choose strategies for the whole course of the game 3. Moves that are not an equilibrium in the stage game CAN BE an equilibrium in the repeated game

Standard error

1. A standard error is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic. Standard error is a statistical term that measures the accuracy with which a sample represents a population. In statistics, a sample mean deviates from the actual mean of a population; this deviation is the standard error. 2. Tells you the precision of your measures. Btw, counting years no longer acceptable in political science. Ross's work is considered rubbish today, because his dependent variables were clearly related. 3. Standard error should be half or less of a coefficient.

Limited external validity of experiments 2

1. Actual political outcomes result of intersection of many complicated causes (that's why experimentalists want to study 'causes of effects') 2. Isolating one cause-effect pair in a causal 'Rube Goldberg device' in a particular setting unlikely to tell us anything about other contexts

Adam Smith

1. Adam Smith believed that there was a natural progress of opulence. 2. Darwin, inspired by Smith, believed in evolution. 3. In late 19th and early 20th centuries, Weber brought all these strands of developmental history together.

Cargo cult

1. After World War II anthropologists discovered that an unusual religion had developed among the islanders of the South Pacific. It was oriented around the concept of cargo which the islanders perceived as the source of the wealth and power of the Europeans and Americans. This religion, known as the Cargo Cult, held that if the proper ceremonies were performed shipments of riches would be sent from some heavenly place. It was all very logical to the islanders. The islanders saw that they worked hard but were poor whereas the Europeans and Americans did not work but instead wrote things down on paper and in due time a shipment of wonderful things would arrive. 2. The Cargo Cult members built replicas of airports and airplanes out of twigs and branches and made the sounds associated with airplanes to try to activate the shipment of cargo.

Making Democracy Work (1993)

1. Aided by Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, Putnam evaluates the institutional performance of twenty Italian regional governments using surveys, interviews and a diverse set of policy indicators. His central finding is that wide variations in the performance of these governments are closely related to the vibrancy of associational life in each region. 2. In northern Italy, where citizens participate actively in sports clubs, literary guilds, service groups and choral societies, regional governments are "efficient in their internal operation, creative in their policy initiatives and effective in implementing those initiatives." 3. In southern Italy, by contrast, where patterns of civic engagement are far weaker, regional governments tend to be corrupt and inefficient. Putnam explains this relationship between strong networks of citizen participation and positive institutional performance in terms of "social capital" -- the networks, norms of reciprocity and trust that are fostered among the members of community associations by virtue of their experience of social interaction and cooperation. He argues that social capital has a positive impact on governance because it allows community members to overcome the dilemmas of collective action which would otherwise hamper their attempts to cooperate for the purpose of bettering social life.

The Methodology Spectrum

1. Anthropology at one end 2. Field experiments at other end 3. Ross closer to field experiments 4. Skocpol closer to anthropology 5. People in the middle have trouble with medium-n studies

Rise of experimentalism in political science 1

1. As of 2000, experiments all but non-existent in political science: Green and Gerber find 4 experimental political science studies before 2003 2. October 2015 issue of APSR begins with four experimental studies

Braid Game, Cont'd

1. Backward induction: start at the end and work backward 2. Credible threat is a key insight of game theory 3. Threat of no TV from Woodruff isn't credible. Woodruff is being strategically incompetent by not being able to braid his daughter's hair, though he'd rather grant his daughter's request and avoid future conflict and disruption later that day and get to work on time. Sasha's threat is credible.

II. And now some very basic statistics

1. Basic task: given some data on something you want to explain (dependent variable) 2. Try to come up with a formula that does a pretty good job of predicting that data using an independent variable or variables.

Median voter theorem

1. Black's [1948] median voter theorem makes the following (conditional) universal claim: whenever a committee of the Revenue Ministry of Chad sets a tax rate on a commodity in a manner that looks like majority decision making, it will share much in common with the Revenue Committee of the Chicago City Council setting a property tax rate - viz., if preferences among the deciders are single-peaked, then the tax rate preferred by the median committee member will prevail in each case. (Shepsle 2006) 2. Shepsle's point of progress is a study done in 1946, ages ago. 3. Also MVT is mathematical: outcome has to be this way. 4. This doesn't tell you whether preferences are single-peaked, vote counting is fair. MVT doesn't tell you much.

dichotomous (or categorical) variables

1. Can take only two values, binary. 2. This is the way Skocpol initially uses variables, though she moves on to 3 levels of international pressure. 3. Categorical: variable can take discrete values 4. Mill uses dichotomous variables 5. Can create these variables from continuous ones by using a threshhold

Case vs. observation

1. Case = observation for statistics 2. Case > observation for qualitative work

What is causal heterogeneity?

1. Causal heterogeneity exists when a population has subgroups that interact - deterministically - with a treatment to give different results for each subgroup. 2. I.e. don't lump together too many cases, because you'll be dealing with dissimilar cases with different underlying factors

Causal mechanisms and process tracing

1. Causal mechanism: an explanation of how a cause produces an effect. A. Explanation should consist of a chain of very plausible, empirically confirmable cause-effect relationships B. Interesting mechanisms are potentially repeatable 2. Note: many competing definitions

Causes of effects vs. Effects of causes

1. Causes of effects: What caused the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions? 2. Effects of causes: Suppose we subject some states to international pressure and others not—what is the difference in outcomes?

Defining causality in terms of experiments

1. Causes should be conceived of as interventions or manipulations. The effect of a cause should be measured against the counterfactual of what would have happened without that intervention. A. Thus, defines relevant counterfactual: "For causal inference, it is critical that each unit be potentially exposable to any one of the causes." 2. Study the effects of causes rather than the causes of effects 3. Causes of effects: why did the French Revolution happen? 4. Effects of causes: varying treatment

Routinisation of charisma

1. Charismatic leader needs a staff 2. Staff has ideal and (especially) material interests A, "Every charisma is on the road from a turbulently emotional life that knows no economic rationality to a slow death by suffocation under the weight of material interests: every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end." (E&S 1120) Note: when it came to charisma, Weber was thinking of Lenin, Trotsky. Weber wanted to emphasize the routinization of charisma. Charismatic leaders need staff. Staff has ideological and $$ interests. Weber said that socialists suffered from this.

Terminological clarification: cherry-picking vs. selection bias

1. Cherry-picking: selection on both dependent and independent variable 2. Selection bias: selection on dependent variable

Putnam's causal mechanism: 'social capital'

1. Conceive social life as consisting in prisoners' dilemmas 2. Repeated play, reputation can facilitate cooperation 3. Associational life gives a form of repeated play; networks allow transmission of reputational information. "Social capital" = transmissible reputational information 4. Cooperative and non-cooperative equilibria persist for a long time Note: there will be many equilibria: 1) non cooperation leads to no trust, 2) cooperation leads to trust. Putnam believes these outcomes persist and last for a long time.

Rational choice theory

1. Core postulate: we can gain great insight into core problems of comparative politics with deductive models 2. These models deduce the choices of relevant actors from these actors' interests, usually understood in material terms: as deductive methods, conlcusions follow logically from these premises and means are related to ends A. "At least is specific areas, individual conduct is wholly determined by the endeavor to relate means to ends as efficiently as possible."(Rogowski 1978, 299) 3. Often, these are models of strategic interaction, treated by game theory

Significance of disciplinary techniques 1

1. Creating norms makes noting and punishing deviation cheap (exams!) 2. Prisoner or other disciplined person must internalise system--'self' is an effect of discipline A. "The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."(D&P 30)

Crisis of Modernisation Theory, circa 1970 (2)

1. Crisis has two aspects: A. Empirical: how can we explain things about the real world elided by modernisation theory? B. Scientific status (methodology): what makes us scientific, if not structural-functionalism? 2. Subsequent evolution of the field driven by answers to these questions: a permanent identity crisis Note: the 2nd aspect has been more important for its enduring legacy

III. Comparative politics after the collapse of modernisation theory

1. Crisis of Modernisation Theory, circa 1970 2. Theory fell apart around 1970 and has been having a permanent identity crisis since then

scope conditions

1. Criteria which constrain the applicability of universal propositions 2. Limitations e.g. for Skocpol: before 1947, proto-bureaucratic, large, agricultural 3. MIll's methods are insufficient by themselves 4. Within case comparisons are good to tease greater in-case validity 5. Conditions in which theory applies. These make the theory less falsifiable. Think of it as interaction in the background.

Path dependency example: Hacker on US health care system

1. Critical Juncture: New Deal welfare state expansion 2. Instead of state-run healthcare, no universal insurance 3. Because there's no universal insurance, employers offer insurance as wage alternative during wartime wage controls 4. Powerful private insurers and favourable tax treatment of business insurance plans militates against state-run healthcare 5. Thus, even today insurers constitute a major constituency against state-run healthcare With path dependency, the past is never dead

cross-sectional

1. Cross-sectional studies make comparisons at a single point in time, whereas longitudinal studies make comparisons over time. The research question will determine which approach is best. 2. The defining feature of a cross-sectional study is that it can compare different population groups at a single point in time. Think of it in terms of taking a snapshot. Findings are drawn from whatever fits into the frame.

The Argument over Science 2

1. Curiousities pass, interests change, but scientific laws are forever 2. Ok, but in what terms are these laws going to be phrased? 3. In whatever terms work: in physics it's masses, in chemistry molecules. We'll discover the required vocabulary of "law-concepts." Don't have to stick with "holes" or anything else. 4. Weber: There's no reason to expect any overlap between "law-concepts" and "value-concepts" describing stuff we care about 5. MacIntyre's clearly making fun of the character in the parable.. He argues that our concepts may have no scientific standing. But problem of concepts didn't stop physics with masses and chemistry with molecules. Scientists discover the concepts they need as they go. Weber calls these "law-concepts." Weber's key point in response: no reason to expect overlaps between "law-concepts" and what we care about e.g. revolutions, "value-concepts." This debate is still relevant.

R squared 1

1. Definition: the "percent of variance explained" by the model 2. how well the model fits the data.

Democracy in Modernisation Theory

1. Democracy and "modernity" go together 2. Modernity, involves, inter alia, impersonalization 3. In 1950s and 1960s, difficult to sustain the argument tath development feeds democracy e.g. Germany (1930s), USSR (1917)

I. Background for empirical readings:

1. Democracy and development 2. Why is it that economic development leads to democracy?

Democracy and development after Lipset

1. Democracy could be explained by political conjunctures ("neutralism"): Rustow argued that economic development is neutral with respect to democracy. The emergence of democracy is explained by a random set of events, a political conjuncture, and so we need to look into case histories. A. Rustow (1970): "Transitions to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model" a. Genetic, not functional; distinguish onset and maintenance: find the origins (genesis) of democracy b. "Not all causal links run from social and economic to political factors" i.e. sometimes political changes happen for political reasons c. "To seek causal explanations does not imply simple- mindedness. Specifically, we need not assume that the transition to democracy is a world-wide uniform process, that it always involves the same social classes, the same types of political issues, or even the same methods of solution." i.e. Rustow advocates on behalf of particularism. No parsimonious theory is good. Rustow makes a good point: maybe democracy happens for specific reasons in specific countries. d. Background condition (national unity) plus phases 2. Later: Game theory, including Przeworski (1991)

Week 3

1. Democratization: From Developmentalism to Large-N Studies 2. Substantive topic: origins of democracy 3. Methodological topic: large-N studies 4. Mark West has a serious point 5. Hall makes a criticism of large-N studies

Non-credible threat: "No fussing or no TV"

1. Either Sasha can make a fuss and make Woodruff late for work. 2. If she chooses the latter and Woodruff says no TV to punish her, there won't be any calm and it will be difficult for Woodruff to make dinner. If the TV is on, Woodruff won't have to worry.

How do the empirical observations in process-tracing differ from those used in statistical research?

1. Empirical observations in process tracing are noncomparable, while those in statistics are comparable. 2. Need to find observations that are smoking guns for process tracing. Circumstantial evidence and smoking guns lead to process tracing. 3. You also need assumptions

Skocpol v. Moore

1. Empirical: Focused on events within countries, ignores war and international pressure 2. Methodological: Structure of reasoning opaque. Proposes "Millian" small-N comparison (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) 3. I.e. Skocpol is innovative, because of introduction of international pressure and use of Mill's methods

Repeated play in game theory 2

1. Example: tit-for-tat in repeated (or "iterated") prisoners' dilemma: 2. "start by playing cooperate, and then in each subsequent round play what your opponent played in the prior round" Note: it's important that you don't know when the game is going to end, because uncertainty about the future fosters cooperation.

Political dependency

1. Experiments are often EXPENSIVE, so dependent on funding sources 2. "[O]pportunities for conducting field experiments are greatest when researchers work in close proximity with political and social actors. Indeed, with a bit of imagination, scholars can sometimes craft experiments in ways that are costless to the organizations that implement them." (Green & Gerber 2003)

external validity

1. External validity refers to how well data and theories from one setting apply to another. 2. How well model explains cases outside of your case

Power and More

1. For Foucault, power suffuses society and isn't relational 2. Panopticon not irrelevant to authoritarian Syria and Czechoslovakia 3. Panopticon is a passive form of control as opposed to performance emphasized in Syria and Czechoslovakia 4. Geertz would say that using one story to generalize would be very bad, as Wedeen does 5. Because Scott and Wedeen speak to a political science audience, they overgeneralize

Covering law

1. From Almond and Genco 2. The model of explanation alluded to here is the so-called "covering law" or deductive-nomological (D-N) model developed in the philosophy of science by R. B. Braithwaite, Carl Hempel, and others. 3. The basic idea underlying this model is that something is explained when it has been shown to be a member of a more general class of things. "To explain something is to exhibit it as a special case of what is known in general."" This is achieved, according to the model, when the particular case is deduced from a more general law (or set of laws) that "covers" it and all other relevantly similar cases. That is why generalizations play such a fundamental role in deductive explanations. 4. I.e. identify a set of conditions that happen together: universal, rigid and deterministic in its most narrow form 5. Almond and Geno argue that there are generalizations, but they're context-specific and decay over time

Summary of literature context for Varshney

1. From ethnic conflict literature: problem of explaining preserved peace rather than conflict 2. From Putnam: how to show mechanism by which civic community (social capital) operates Note: Varshney hopes to explain puzzles through process tracing.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish 1

1. From public torture 2. Braveheart chronicles Scottish resistance against the English. In the last scene, Mel Gibson is drawn and quartered, but screams freedom. 3. Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with a similar story but the guy relents. 4. Foucault charts the evolution from public torture to disciplinary regimentation. Foucault says that power used to be a spectacle and then became a disciplinary power e.g. waiting for the drumroll.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish 2

1. From public torture... 2. ...to disciplinary regimentation "Art. 18. Rising. At the first drum-roll, the prisoners must rise and dress in silence, as the supervisor opens the cell door. At the second drum-roll, they must be dressed and make their beds. At the third, they must line up and proceed to the chapel for morning prayer. There is a five-minute interval between each drum-roll." --1830s rules for 'House of young prisoners' 3. Foucault asks not so much why the shift, as how, and with what consequences. Note: Foucault wants to suggest that spectacular torture is a contest which requires public acceptance. This is a theater. There's always the possibility of an unforeseen outcome e.g. shouting freedom

Modernisation Theory

1. Gabriel Almond: "...our capacity for explanation and prediction in the social sciences is enhanced when we think of social structures and institutions as performing functions in systems."(184) i.e. Almond read from American institutions a metric to measures states. 2. Motive force: Evolution proceeds via differentiation, whereby structures become increasingly specialised in carrying out particular functions 3. Trajectory: In highly developed systems A. Political system is differentiated: rule formulation, rule implementation, rule adjudication handled by separate institutions B. Interest groups make "pragmatic specific" demands, parties aggregate demands as inputs into political system, political system produces policies as output C. In less developed systems, less differentiation, mixing of roles

Questions to pose to game theory 1

1. Game theory involves two elements A. Assumption that people make rational choices: not always the case. B. Description of situation in which these choices get made (aside: not always game theoretic): this is an even more heroic assumption than rationality. Golden Balls is (are lol) unusual. Ordinary life isn't like that. We're not playing the Prisoner's Dilemma when we meet someone of another ethnic group or even obeying the law. Game theory insists that the punishment is greater than the chances of getting caught and this explains compliance. We all obey and disobey the law regularly. 2. Question: Is the description of the situation appropriate? A. Can the moves and payoffs be fully specified? B. Example: Can we come up with a game theoretic model

II. 'Selection bias

1. Geddes says selecting cases on basis of of outcome will bias the conclusion 2. Collier et al. say the opposite 3. Remember from seminar: your belief in selection bias is directly connected to your faith in the power of process tracing i.e. good process tracing obviates concerns about bad selection bias

Crux of disagreement

1. Geddes: "[S]election of cases for study on the basis of outcomes on the dependent variable biases conclusions." In particular, this method can lead researchers to perceive causal relationships that don't exist 2. Collier et al.: A. The usual selection bias problem is the opposite one: it can obscure causal relationships that do exist B. Small-N studies in any event rely on process tracing, not regression logic,

A view on progress in comparative politics 1

1. Given reflexivity, generalisations will not be exceptionless 2. Fairly intricate causal mechanisms that apply to more than one situation are sometimes possible because institutions have constrained and patterned choices: institutions lead to predictability. Just have to be clear about the contexts that leads to generalizations. A. Note that median voter theorem, Duverger's law apply to electoral systems

Crisis of Modernisation Theory, circa 1970 (1)

1. Have you noticed we don't know how differentiation works? (No causal mechanism, patterns seen as explanations) 2. Have you noticed that change isn't gradual? 3. Have you noticed that countries invade and colonise each other, so internal differentiating processes are probably not the whole story? 4. Have you noticed that ascription isn't going anywhere?

MacIntyre's parable, III

1. He rejected [from the outset] the -- as he saw it -pathetically common-sense view that of the digging of different kinds of holes there are quite different kinds of explanations to be given: why then he would ask do we have the concept of a hole? NOTE: Are there scientific laws about ANY concept/category we can think of? 2 ... Had he ... turned his talents to political science, had he concerned himself not with holes, but with modernization, urbanization or violence, I find it difficult to believe that he might not have achieved high office in the [American Political Science Association]. 3. That is to say, no general theory of holes possible. Same goes for revolution, ethnic conflict. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we can't have a theory of those things.

heterogeneity of treatment effects

1. Heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) is the nonrandom, explainable variability in the direction and magnitude of treatment effects for individuals within a population. 2. More simply, effects of treatment vary across individuals and so can explain average treatment effect. Of course, need a good theory about treatment effects. 3. Olken finds that plebiscites make poorer villages happier than richer villages, where treatment has little effect

Probit analysis

1. How do probabilities of outcomes change given changes in independent (influencing) variables? A. Substantive significance: How much does probability increase? 2. If you see somebody analysing something that ought to be dichotomous (democracy - no democracy) with a linear regression rather than probit (or logit), be suspicious I.E. ROSS

Anxieties about scientific status

1. How do we explain? 2. How do we make progress? (Do we make progress?)

By way of recap: to look for in Skocpol

1. How does she react to the Marxist tradition? 2. How does she (largely implicitly) incorporate Weberian ideas? 3. How does she react to the Parsonian/modernisation theory tradition (represented by Chalmers Johnson)? 4. How does she establish her scientific legitimacy?

What is a discount rate?

1. How much you value the future in relation to the present. A high discount rate means you're very uncertain and value the present a lot. 2. High discount rate + repeated games = people will defect. This is even more true, if the number of games is known to the players.

Statisticians fight back 2

1. If confounders really unknowable, results of experiments uninterpretable. Consider this possibility A. Population actually consists of positive response group (eg, like independent television) and negative response group (eg, dislike independent television) B. Experiment shows zero average effect but obscures actual effect 2. If confounders unknowable, who's to say?

Reasoning process 2

1. If he shares, I should steal (100 > 50) 2. If he steals, I should steal (0 > -10) 3. Thus I should always steal, no matter what other player does 4. Nash equilibrium: each player has picked best strategy, assuming opponent plays best strategy

Reasoning Process 1

1. If he shares, I should steal (100 > 50) 2. If he steals, it doesn't matter what I do (0 = 0) 3. Same holds, even if payoff matrix is modified so that loss from divergent choices means loser loses 10K

Credible ("subgame perfect") threat

1. If we got to that node (make a fuss and leave late or accept default hairstyle), would the threat be carried out? 2. According to Sasha's specified preferences, she's indifferent between being late and being on time, so "make a fuss" a plausible (credible) choice here

Why do this?

1. If you can make it work, it's evidence (not necessarily decisive) that the independent variable or variables explain the dependent variable 2. Remember correlation is not causation i.e. umbrellas don't cause rain

Yugoslavia (1991)

1. In 1991, Yugoslavia began to break up along ethnic lines. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became the central theater of fighting. 2. The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people and displaced more than two million. 3. The height of the killing took place in July 1995 when 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in what became known as the Srebrenica genocide, the largest massacre in Europe after the Holocaust.

Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966)

1. In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore seeks to explain the developmental trajectories that transform agrarian societies into modern industrial ones. 2. Leveraging a neo-marxist approach focused on the emergence of social classes and inter-class coalitions, Moore argues that there are three historical routes from agrarianism to the modern industrial world. 3. In the capitalist democratic route, exemplified by England, France, and the United States, the peasantry was politically impotent or had been eradicated all together, a strong bourgeoisie was present, and the aristocracy allied itself with the bourgeoisie or failed to oppose its democratizing efforts. 4. In the capitalist reactionary route, exemplified by Germany and Japan, the peasantry posed a threat to the interests of both the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, which consequently formed a conservative alliance against the peasantry; this alliance bolstered an autonomous, occasionally authoritarian state capable of being coopted by a fascist leader in a revolution from above. 5. Finally, in the communist route, exemplified by China and Russia, the bourgeoisie failed to emerge and the the peasantry was strong and independent enough from the aristocracy to spur a radical revolution from below against the centralized agrarian bureaucracy. India is an awkward outlier, having subscribed to none of the foregoing paths

The Iron Cage

1. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber warned that the rationalist spirit ushered in by asceticism had achieved a momentum of its own and that, under capitalism, the rationalist order had become an iron cage in which humanity was, save for the possibility of prophetic revival, imprisoned "perhaps until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt" 2. This is described in the concluding section of TPEASOC. Weber suggested that driven capitalists set the pace for the modern age. You pretty much had to find a way to act like that. That is to say, the iron cage consisted of the external circumstances built by Calvinist capitalists but inhabited by everyone else. This thesis illustrates one variety of rationalization.

observational vs. experimental research

1. In an observational study investigators observe subjects and measure variables of interest without assigning treatments to the subjects. The treatment that each subject receives is determined beyond the control of the investigator. 2. In an experiment investigators apply treatments to experimental units (people, animals, plots of land, etc.) and then proceed to observe the effect of the treatments on the experimental units

Competitive authoritarianism

1. In competitive authoritarian regimes ... elections are regularly held and are generally free of massive fraud, [but] incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results. Journalists, opposition politicians, and other government critics may be spied on, threatened, harassed, or arrested. Members of the opposition may be jailed, exiled, or—less frequently—even assaulted or murdered. ... 2. Yet if competitive authoritarian regimes fall short of democracy, they also fall short of full-scale authoritarianism. Although incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes may routinely manipulate formal democratic rules, they are unable to eliminate them or reduce them to a mere façade. ... [T]he persistence of meaningful democratic institutions creates arenas through which opposition forces may—and frequently do—pose significant challenges. As a result, even though democratic institutions may be badly flawed, both authoritarian incumbents and their opponents must take them seriously. 3. e.g. Russia, Venezuela 4. i.e. elections mean something, although incumbent abuse state resources

Putnam's dependent variable

1. In early 1970s, Italy reformed its regional government. 2. Most famously, Putnam measured institutional performance .eg. bureaucratic responsiveness as well as whether money allocated to day care centers was spent. 3. Putnam found an enduring connection between past state performance and present state performance. Southern Italian provinces had worse performance over time. Putnam associated political culture with associational life. Putnam followed de Tocqueville.

MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982)

1. In his book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, Chalmers Johnson purports to provide the economic bureaucracy's contribution to Japan's high postwar growth, but in fact tells the story, as the title suggests, in terms of MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) 2. Although in this reviewer's judgment gravely exaggerating the role of MITI within the economic bureaucracy and virtually ignoring the private sector, Johnson provides extraordinary insight into the operations of Japan's bureaucracy and the never-ending turf battles that are an integral part of it. 3. His thesis is that a "miracle" occurred and that it can be explained only by the role of the economic bureaucracy. 4. He sees the economic bureaucracy growing in knowledge and maturity out of the experiences of the 1930s when (under the Important Industries Control Law of 1931) the private sector undertook to control itself, and out of the World War II and occupation experiences when the government dictated to the private sector. 5. In Professor Johnson's judgment, what is new about the role of government in Japan's economy is that a cooperative, shared relationship has developed with the government supplementing, not supplanting (my language), market forces.

Rwandan genocide (1994)

1. In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin. 2. About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. A group of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 and fighting continued until a 1993 peace deal was agreed. 3. On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying then President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi - both Hutus - was shot down, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organised campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse for the genocide.

4. How do comparative politics scholars justify their conclusions scientifically?

1. In lots of distinct ways 2. I.e. political scientists wrestle with how to make their field a science. You can't benefit from comparative politics unless you can argue about scientific standards.

Parsons' attempted synthesis

1. In the 1930s, Talcott Parson said he was going to synthesize all these thinkers 2. A lot of CP today is a reaction to modernization theory and its collapse 3. Parsons described trajectory of history from a very high, abstract level 4. Parsons thought emotion went away, and was caricaturing the US in the 1950s 5. Modernization theory was not quasi-Darwinian, as was true of Weber's rationalization theory 6. How can Parsons tell this is the trajectory of history by looking at the US?

instrumental variable

1. Instrumental Variables (IV) is a method of estimation that is widely used in many economic applications when correlation between the explanatory variables and the error term is suspected 2. for example, due to omitted variables, measurement error, or other sources of simultaneity bias 3. The IV is known to be exogenous

What is "instrumentalism" in the context of game theory?

1. Instrumentalism: it predicts things. Idea that as long as model predicts things, it doesn't matter how outlandish the assumptions are e.g. positive economics of Milton Friedman. 2. Przeworski is more bottom up inductive than Fearon and Laitin, which is more abstract and deductive. Even for Fearon and Laitin's best example, Israel-Palestine, they ignore the strength of the Israeli state and the impunity of settlers. Fearon and Laitin are playing repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games, and they also do large-N badly. Przeworski says with full information and stable preferences, a transition to democracy is impossible. Przeworski is more realistic than Fearon and Laitin.

Strategic interaction

1. Interaction between two or more people, in which the best choice for each depends on what the others decide to do 2. Strategic interaction is anticipating what the other person(s) decide(s) to do 3. Row vs. column in tic-tac-toe: Golden Balls is similar to Prisoner's Dilemma 4. For Golden Balls: if both share, they both get 50K; if both steal, they both get nothing; if their choices differ, one gets 100K and the other gets nothing

Some key Weber differences from Marx

1. Interest groups exist in relation to institutions, not just economic position e.g. lawyers block adoption of Roman law 2. State a force in its own right: state can transform and tame challenges and this helps drive the state 3. Material and ideal interests important: ideology matters 4. Multiple developmental histories: context matters

internal validity 1

1. Internal validity refers to how well an experiment is done, especially whether it avoids confounding (more than one possible independent variable [cause] acting at the same time). The less chance for confounding in a study, the higher its internal validity is. 2. Therefore, internal validity refers to how well a piece of research allows you to choose among alternate explanations of something. A research study with high internal validity lets you choose one explanation over another with a lot of confidence, because it avoids (many possible) confounds. 3. How well model explains case

internal validity 2

1. Internal validity refers to how well an experiment is done, especially whether it avoids confounding (more than one possible independent variable [cause] acting at the same time). The less chance for confounding in a study, the higher its internal validity is. 2. Therefore, internal validity refers to how well a piece of research allows you to choose among alternate explanations of something. A research study with high internal validity lets you choose one explanation over another with a lot of confidence, because it avoids (many possible) confounds. 3. How well model explains case

Process-tracing

1. Involves following the steps in the causal mechanism ("causal process observations"), demonstrating that each is taking place A. Intervening variables, not just dependent and independent, relevant 2. Much disagreement in practice about what constitutes adequate detail 3. "Very plausible" standard may help in judging Note: process tracing suggests describing processes by which causes produce effects. Though the standard is subjective, it does convey the necessary information. Note: Gerring says you need to follow the steps and demonstrate each takes place. Hall also advocates systemic process observation (THIS WOULD MAKE FOR A GOOD ESSAY QUESTION, AS IT IS CROSS-CUTTING)

Questions to pose to game theory 2

1. Is "instrumentalism" appropriate? i.e. models can be instruments for making predictions, even if we know that the assumption aren't accurate A. If the model not meant to actually describe the world, but just to predict it (an "instrumental" attitude), why should we expect that it will work? i.e. people can go through the situation B. In particular, why should modelling people as making decisions in ways that they manifestly cannot give us the right answer? i.e. people can't go through the situation 2. Does the formal model improve on "the intuition"? Intuition is a mathematical model of what you think happens. Why use a model when intuition works? Note: for political science, there is no market that could bring about every situation.

The end-point: modern bureaucracy

1. Jurisdictional areas 2. Office hierarchy: for Weber, this is a novel development. 3. Runs based on written documents preserved in files 4. General rules, quite stable and nearly exhaustive: very hard to make lots of decisions on a case-by-case basis. 5. Management based on thorough training in specialised field 6. Full-time, exclusive employment of bureaucrats: a bureaucrat without full-time employment may not be loyal to the state. 7. Compare the discussion of the French and Prussian states in Skocpol. The Prussian state was the model for Weber, and in Skocpol has 2 features that the French state does not. Note: this is an accurate description of modern bureaucracy.

Significance of disciplinary techniques 2

1. Knowledge and power inseparable 2. "[P]ower is exercised rather than possessed" 3. No single narrative of power (eg, class struggle), 'micro-powers' permeate society, constant local rather than universal struggle

Significance of disciplinary techniques 3

1. Knowledge and power inseparable 2. "[P]ower is exercised rather than possessed" 3. No single narrative of power (eg, class struggle), 'micro-powers' permeate society, constant local rather than universal struggle 4. Note how much harder it is to fight this power; unlike public torture as contest Note: Wedeen argues that political power in Syria was based in a norm-creating mechanism that made it easy to detect and punish disloyalty.

Weber on limits of covering law model

1. Knowledge of laws (nomological knowledge) not the be-all and end-all for social science -- can't know which will be relevant to our concrete interests A. "How much further present-day 'abstract theory' should be elaborated is ultimately a question of the economy of scientific labour, and such labour has other problems to pursue. The 'theory of marginal utility' is after all subject to the 'law of marginal utility'" (Weber, "Objectivity") 2. 'Folk psychology' supplies most of the universal generalisations we need 3. That is to say, we can do well with interpretivism, as abstract theories are subject to diminishing marginal returns.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy. The American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69-105.

1. Lipset most influentially articulated the thesis of modernization leading to democracy 2. Lipset looked at per-capita income in countries he categorized. From his work: 3. Perhaps the most widespread generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development. Concretely, this means that the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy. 4. As a means of concretely testing this hypothesis, various indices of economic development-wealth, industrialization, urbanization and education-have been defined, and averages (means) have been computed for the countries which have been classified as more or less democratic in the Anglo-Saxon world and Europe and Latin America. 5. In each case, the average wealth, degree of industrialization and urbanization, and level of education is much higher for the more democratic countries, as the data presented in Table II indicate. If we had combined Latin America and Europe in one table, the differences would have been greater.

Aside: "Parsimony"

1. Literally, parsimony = extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources 2. Parsimonious theories are those that explain "a lot with a little" -- they have a small number of independent variables that explain some significant differences in dependent variables 3. Lipset's theory is not parsimonious 4. Note that this is an aesthetic principle Note: shouldn't get too caught up in being parsimonious. World could work in complex ways. It's a heroic assumption to believe that the world works in simple ways. Prezworksi and Limongi think democracy is caused by random factors, its persistence is explained by economic wealth.

MacIntyre and More

1. MacIntyre's argument is too relativist. 2. Cross-cultural fault line isn't only relevant one 3. Moreover, it goes against notion of human equality.

Reanimation of political culture: Putnam 1

1. Making Democracy Work (1993) 2. Compares government performance across Italy's regions A. Measurement is one reason work is famous

Marx v. Weber on Religion and Capitalism

1. Marx believed that religion got in the way of people perceiving class struggle 2. Weber took religion more seriously. He thought religion was an important driver of history, because it got them thinking. Evident in his most famous argument 3. Whereas Marx defined capitalism, Weber asked about emotional energy necessary for accumulation

Limitations of political culture as an explanation

1. Max Weber: "The appeal to national character is generally a mere confession of ignorance."(Protestant Ethic) 2. How does it persist or change? Where does it come from? Some chose to reanimate the classics. Others borrowed methods e.g. game theory to explain political cultures.

Putnam's causal mechanism

1. Medieval institutions account for 2. Civic community e.g. guilds leads to 3. Repeated play in local prisoners' dilemmas leads to 4. Social capital and appreciation for the joys of collaboration lead to 5. Collective action leads to 6. Good governance

A Note on Varshey

1. Method of difference: different outcomes with cases as similar as possible. 2. Varshney's comparisons aren't super rigorous. 3. Always needs to address endogeneity. Literacy, inequality, segregation, rule of law could explain both civil society and ethnic conflict. 4. Skocpol would've done truth table like Chandra. 5. For dissertations, won't just use Mill's methods: they're too weak. Dissertations should be case-oriented and based on process-tracing. 6. If you have a preexisting hypothesis, it's more convincing. A negative hypothesis is good if you attack someone else.

What are some of the problems of the two methods?

1. MoD Implicitly used by LWL, who don't have atheoretical observations, though observations are always theory-dependent. Bellin and LWL categorize the same things differently. 2. Problem for both is that variables can interact. Posner also uses MoD.

Modernisation theory and a world of differences 1

1. Modernisation theorists recognise diversity across nation-states, but what explains it? 2. Early answer: Political culture

Max Weber's developmental history

1. Much less compact thinker than Marx 2. Describes processes that can unfold in multiple ways in multiple settings 3. Focused on causal mechanisms 4. Multi-stranded key process: rationalisation A. Drive for logical consistency in religious doctrine B. Drive for technical efficiency in administration, fitting of means to ends

Reflections on cumulation 2

1. Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." i.e. science grows cumulatively 2. Geertz: "Every serious cultural analysis starts from a sheer beginning and ends where it manages to get before exhausting its intellectual impulse. Previously discovered facts are mobilized, previously developed concepts used, previously formulated hypotheses tried out; but the movement is not from already proven theorems to newly proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary understanding to a supported claim that one has achieved that and surpassed it. A study is an advance if it is more incisive--whatever that may mean--than those that preceded it; but it less stands on their shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runs by their side." i.e. Newtonian contention doesn't apply to social science

Potential methodological reasons to reject Lachapelle et al. insights

1. Not general enough: doesn't test against a broader universe of cases 2. Not based on on deduction from general principles about what people are like Do you want others to legislate these issues for you?

unit homogeneity

1. Observations are the same, and thus it is possible to draw a valid conclusion from them 2. Same causal laws apply to other cases in the theoretical model

Fearon (1991) 3

1. Often possible to give good arguments about what would have happened even without an actual case for comparison, relying on: A. Scientific knowledge B. Common sense generalisations 2. Crucial claim for legitimacy of process tracing

Prisoners' dilemma 2

1. Often taken as a metaphor for problems of social co-operation 2. Implications are depressing: implications are also overstated, because we cooperate all the time 3. Less depressing: repeated play: maybe game is played repeatedly

Domination and Resistance 2 (older)

1. Older (Weberian) question on domination: what kinds of claims to authority (normatively legitimate domination) exist and what are their organisational correlates? 2. Newer (post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-Marxist) question on domination: how are coercive, remunerative [material], and normative power organised and linked with one another?

Domination and Resistance 3 (newer)

1. Older (Weberian) question on domination: what kinds of claims to authority (normatively legitimate domination) exist and what are their organisational correlates? 2. Newer (post-modernist, poststructuralist, post-Marxist) question on domination: how are coercive, remunerative [material], and normative power organised and linked with one another?

Week 9 Readings

1. Olken intervened in a process in Indonesia 2. Cartwright is a philosopher of science

Stanislav Petrov

1. On 26 September 1983, the world was saved from potential nuclear disaster. 2. In the early hours of the morning, the Soviet Union's early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Computer readouts suggested several missiles had been launched. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. 3. But duty officer Stanislav Petrov - whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches - decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm. 4. This was a breach of his instructions, a dereliction of duty. The safe thing to do would have been to pass the responsibility on, to refer up. 5. But his decision may have saved the world. 6. That is to say, he went against the doomsday machine that automatically launched nukes in response to a nuclear attack. This contradicts the idea that people have complete information, and thus that game theory is always the right model to use.

Note

1. On this year's exam, there are more methodology-driven questions than empirically-driven questions 2. But don't forget to use empirical pieces when answering methodological questions! 3. DON'T REPEAT READINGS ON QUESTIONS. USE DIVERSE SELECTION OF WORKS

II. What is a causal explanation?

1. One definition of CP is that it tries to explain political outcomes 2. In order to explain cause, need counterfactuals.

What is the difference between an outlier and an extreme case in a statistical model?

1. Outlier: case with high error term 2. Extreme case: an extreme value on the dependent variable

'Game theory forces scholars to oversimplify human interactions and therefore provides only misleading causal explanations.' Discuss.

1. Payoffs are context-specific A. E.g. theft as charity B. Implies different reactions to sanctions C. Przeworski says payoffs can change because people change their opinion. D. It's hard to create an externally valid theory. [NOTE: SELECT LIMITED SET OF ARGUMENTS THEN EXECUTE THEM WELL] E. For Fearon and Laitin, people may want to irrationally escalate conflict. They could be entrepreneurs. F. Can criticize the rationality assumed. G. Petrov: information is ambiguous. Can screw things up in ethnic conflict. [ALWAYS GOOD TO LOOK AT COUNTERARGUMENTS] H. Hardliners misinterpreted softliners. Fearon and Laitin introduced noise into their model. I. If you explain everything in terms of payoffs, the model is unfalsifiable e.g. people tip at restaurants they won't visit again. Need to differentiate between strict and loose game theory. J. Game theory used to explain behavior of aggregates, which are internally homogenous. K. Game theory works better in some contexts than in others. L. Game theory doesn't produce externally valid theories. [NOTE: PICK TWO ASPECTS AND EXAMINE THEM IN NEW DEPTH WITH NEW CONNECTIONS]

Putnam: statistical analysis

1. Performance (dependent variable) 2. Civic community (independent variable) 3. Very good correlation across Italian regions, r=0.92 4. To get to this point, Putnam catalogued all the organizations in Italy's provinces and arrived at this stunning correlation. Putnam's causal mechanism is social capital formed through repeated prisoner's dilemmas.

Suspicions of deliberative democracy

1. Possibly 'captured' by elites 2. Cuts ordinary people out of political participation, reduces sense of legitimacy

Deliberative democracy

1. Potential consequence of the organisation of the 'power to decide' in ways that promote deliberation 2. Rather than implementing the will of the people, properly structured representative institutions constitute it Note: Some argue that direct democracy is not best form because it doesn't promote discussion. Supporters of deliberative democracy believe that institutions constitute popular will. Some proponents push for more insulation from the will of the people

Blackheath newsagent bans an entire school

1. Power has to be continually reproduced e.g. UK kids have to wear school uniforms. 2. Shopkeeper could easily ban kids from a given school. 3. Foucault thinks this disciplinary power creates norms through power is exercised.

Applying the result

1. Pressing toaster lever leads to...no water release at all! 2. Result isn't 'externally valid'! 3. That is to say, we know toilets aren't the same as toaster because of different causal contexts - this is reminiscent of the white powder in the first lecture.

English Variant

1. Prince creates gentry to balance barons: the gentry is less specialized 2. Gentry takes over local administration with tolerable effectiveness 3. Common-law lawyers block reception of Roman law: lawyers don't want to be put out of business. Leads to less bureaucratic state with different powers

Continental Pattern

1. Prince's desire for autonomy from estates 2. Demands of technical efficiency 3. Availability of Roman-law jurists Leads to rise of absolutist bureaucratic state

Can process-tracing be probabilistic or does it need to assume determinism?

1. Process tracing can be deterministic (Skocpol) or probabilistic (Varshney). 2. There is pressure on small-n scholars to make deterministic conclusions. 3. You can say process tracing is internally valid.

How is process-tracing linked to the concept of "intervening variables"?

1. Process tracing requires intervening variable. 2. Independent variable affects the intervening variable, which in turn affects the dependent variable 3. Process tracing involves showing the steps that led to an outcome.

Democracy and Development after Lipset

1. Przeworski and Limongi 1997: What statistical process produces the correlation between democracy and development? 2. They're reacting to Rustow's 1970 piece. 3. P+L say Lipset is right that rich countries tend to be more democratic. They try to figure out the statistical process behind this. They say the process of becoming a democracy is random, but wealth helps ensure the survival of democracy.

Putnam's evidence 1

1. Putnam finds a correlation between civic community (step 2) and good governance (step 6) 2. But what about the other steps?

Putnam's evidence 2

1. Putnam struggles to link medieval institutions (step 1) to civic community (step 2). 2. Putnam ... writes that if he "had known that the reviewers of [his] book would have applied themselves so devotedly to the nineteen pages ... [he] dedicated to the history of Italy before unification, [he] would have perhaps lost twenty years frequenting the historians to understand the intricate mechanisms that govern their shifting professional agreements and disagreements"

Reanimation of political culture

1. Putnam: "Taking part in a choral society or a bird-watching club can teach self-discipline and an appreciation for the joys of successful collaboration."(1993, 90) 2. In early versions called "civic culture," later becomes "civic community"

random assignment

1. Random assignment is a procedure used in experiments to create multiple study groups that include participants with similar characteristics so that the groups are equivalent at the beginning of the study. 2. The procedure involves assigning individuals to an experimental treatment or program at random, or by chance (like the flip of a coin). 3. This means that each individual has an equal chance of being assigned to either group. Usually in studies that involve random assignment, participants will receive a new treatment or program, will receive nothing at all or will receive an existing treatment. When using random assignment, neither the researcher nor the participant can choose the group to which the participant is assigned. 4. The benefit of using random assignment is that it "evens the playing field." That is to say, it's good for controlling for confounders, which should be evenly distributed.

The experimental answer: random assignment

1. Randomly assign groups to 'treatment' (intervention, e.g. watching independent television) and 'control' (e.g., not watching independent television) 2. Difference between dependent variable (eg, opposition vote share) in 'treatment' and 'control' groups gives average causal effect 3. Any 'confounders' should be equally distributed across groups (unless really unlucky) and not obscure average causal effect or prevent successful causal identification

Week 4

1. Rational Choice Theory 2. This is the methodogical matter 3. Fearon and Laitin on ethnic conflict 4. Woodruff summarizes Fearon and Laitin 5. Przeworski offers game theoretic account of the transition to democracy. Game theory is a species of rational choice theory.

Using one large-N and one small-N study, assess Hall's claim that common causal structures cannot effectively be studied by regression analysis.

1. Recap Hall's arguments A. Causality is complex and context-dependent, path-dependent: 1) causal interaction, 2) path dependence, 3) scope conditions 2. Potential problems for Ross: oil could interact with strength and quality of states. Oil could generate instability, which militates against democracy. Oil could become part of the national culture and could interact with historical contingencies. Also we don't know the story of the OECD dummy variable.. Ross doesn't show interaction of oil with the OECD variable. 3. Skocpol: clear path dependency, clear causal interaction, clear scope conditions.

DR WOODRUFF: "Papa doesn't know how to make plaits"

1. Reducing your capacity to make choices can increase your bargaining power 2. Woodruff is being strategically incompetent

A view on progress in comparative politics 2

1. Regard generalisable causal mechanisms as a tools A. Individual studies "progress" by applying existing tools to new situations, creating new tools, or both B. Research as a craft, not a science 2. Avoid two dangers: A. "Don't reinvent the wheel": don't reformulate old theories B. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": don't look for problems solved by the tools you have at your disposal

Post-Weberian Regime Typologies

1. Remember 3 forms of authority are bases on which right to rule is claimed (maybe even granted). 2. Asserting right to rule has organizational implications e.g. legal procedures require implementation. 3. Charisma requires a devoted following 4. Today, a lot of social science is focused on classifying regimes. Until 1991, social scientists tried to define communist rule.

Rent seeking

1. Rent-seeking is the use of the resources of a company, an organization or an individual to obtain economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits to society through wealth creation. An example of rent-seeking is when a company lobbies the government for loan subsidies, grants or tariff protection. 2. I.e. businesses seeking an unhealthy, supranormal return.

Repeated play in game theory 4

1. Repetition allows cooperative outcome to be sustained 2. Indefinite repetition that is 3. The Folk Theorem says that almost anything is sustainable as an equilibrium in a repeated game: one "enforces" desired strategy by threatening to defect to the end of time, which works unless people value winnings today much more than winnings tomorrow Note: can also have an extensive form game

Concepts of Communist Dictatorship

1. Routinized charismatic authority (Jowitt, Janos) 2. Totalitarianism (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956) A. all-encompassing ideology B. single mass party, typically led by one man; a system of terror C. near-monopoly on all means of mass communication D. near-monopoly of instruments of force E. centrally controlled economy

Ayodhya mosque, 1992

1. Saturday (December 6, 2014) marks the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a group of Hindus in 1992. 2. The destruction of the 16th-century mosque in the holy town of Ayodhya in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was a seminal event in the relationship between Muslims and Hindus in India, who say the site where the mosque stood is the birthplace of Lord Ram. 3. In the communal violence that ensued after the mosque was razed to the ground, hundreds died, and the secular fabric of modern India was thrown into jeopardy. 4. On a political level, the demolition of the structure, variously called the Babri Masjid and the Ram birthplace temple, was a culmination of a sustained religious campaign by Hindu activists including many from the Bharatiya Janata Party that now rules India. The party had just two seats in the Parliament in 1989 when its national executive endorsed the demand to build a Ram temple at the site. After the endorsement, the BJP saw its seats in Parliament jump to 85, turning it into a major political force within Indian politics.

Rationalist theories of ethnic violence 2

1. Security Dilemma may overpredict conflict, peace rather than conflict to be explained? 2. Fearon & Laitin 1996 Note; security dilemma overpredicts ethnic conflict, as groups tend to live in peace. This is where Fearon and Laitin come in. So how does Varshney react to rationalists? Varshney does so by invoking the literature on civil society.

Geddes' 'first kind' of selection bias

1. Selection bias exaggerates relationship. 2. In method of agreement: Cases A&B both show high growth and high X, but can't conclude that X matters on that basis. That is to say, you need to look at other cases. 3. Geddes would have a stronger argument if she differentiated between cherry picking and selection bias.

What is the difference of cherry-picking and selection bias?

1. Selection bias: restricting sample on the basis of the dependent variable 2. Cherry-picking: selecting on basis of both independent and dependent variable e.g. choosing your story

Do small-N comparative studies need to avoid 'selection bias' or 'cherry picking' in choosing cases?

1. Selection bias: selection on basis of dependent variable 2. Cherry picking (from Collier et al.): selection on basis of both dependent and independent variable 3. Selection bias: Skocpol focuses on positive cases 4. Fearon and Laitin broadly cherry pick 5. Could also say Wedeen broadly cherry picks 6. Geddes provides better example of looking only at high growth rates 7. Collier and Mahoney's definition of selection bias, namely understating the relationship by examining only top half of a regression, isn't a big problem in qualitative comparative politics. 8. Could argue that Skocpol's cherry picking her scope conditions 9. You can gerrymander your scope conditions 10. Varshney could be cherry picking with his choice of cities. NOTE: Way you think about selection bias and cherry picking depends on how you think about process tracing. Cherry picking very difficult to avoid for small-n studies.

Note: selecting on independent variable does not have the same effects

1. Selection on independent variable (here, only tall dads) doesn't systematically obscure or strengthen the relationship, but unsystematic error goes up (reflected in low r-square) 2. If you look only at tall sons, no real relationship apparent, because only the whole data set gives you the clear relationship between the two heights

Recall modernisation theory

1. Should involve a move from ascription to achievement 2. Examples of ascriptive identities (Varshney 2001) A. race B. tribe C. caste a. religion b. language

Large-N Quantitative Research 2

1. Significance of individual case: Just another data point, potentially atypical 'outlier' that doesn't undermine general conclusions 2. Form of causal mechanism used to explain correlation: Maximally 'parsimonious' (explains 'a lot with a little'), often deduced from core theoretical postulates 3. Alternate hypotheses: Must apply to whole range of cases, tested via inclusion of control variables 4. Data sources: Only quantifiable, 'subjective' judgement to be avoided whenever possible

Small-N Qualitative Research 2

1. Significance of individual case: Must be explained (Lieberson's "determinism") 2. Form of causal mechanism used to explain correlation: Should explain potentially intricate chain of historical events, allow 'process tracing' 3. Alternate hypotheses: May apply only to particular cases; plausible alternatives rejected on basis of historical research 4. Data sources: Qualitative and sometimes quantitative, scholar's judgement at core of enterprise

Linear Regression

1. Simplest form of statistical analysis 2. Looks for the formula of a line that's as close as possible to all the data points 3. Also known as "ordinary least squares" (OLS), because the formula for distance involves squares

What went wrong?

1. Specifically: "White powder" was the wrong description; should have been "flour" and "baking soda"

Large-N Quantitative Research 1

1. Specification of dependent variable: Numerical magnitude (How democratic is a country on a 1-10 scale?) 2. Causal influence of independent variable(s): Changes magnitude of dependent variable (x% more oil means a democracy score that is y points lower) 3. Cases needed to establish conclusions: 'Universe' of cases (Ross: "all sovereign states with populations over one hundred thousand between 1971 and 1997")

Small-N Qualitative Research 1

1. Specification of dependent variable: Outcome (specific form or presence/absence) (Did a social revolution occur?) 2. Causal influence of independent variable(s): Link in a causal chain of necessary or sufficient conditions (International pressure ➔ Need for economic reform ➔ ... ➔ Revolution) 3. Cases needed to establish conclusions: Limited number of cases chosen to provide instructive similarities and contrasts (France, China, Russia, Prussia, Japan)

Statistical results 2

1. Statistical significance = chance that relationship between an independent variable and the dependent variable is an accident. Closer to 0 is better 2. Regime, oil, minerals, income, Islam, OECD all significant at the 0.05 level. 3. It's unusual for R squared not to have been reported. It must've been high in Ross's study. Of course, something can be statistically significant without being meaningful.

Important things to know about statistics 3

1. Statistical significance IS NOT substantive significance 2. Correlation is not causation

Important things to know about statistics 4

1. Statistical significance IS NOT substantive significance 2. Correlation is not causation 3. Demands of linear model: moving from 6 to 7 on democracy scale same as moving from 7 to 8 4. Linear model not appropriate for binary dependent variables

Conclusion

1. Studying 'the effects of causes' is a mirage 2. Despite strong counter-arguments, experimentalist absolutism seems to be spreading; further evidence for the constitutive role of arguments about scientific standards for comparative politics

Week 9

1. Substantive theme: Direct vs. deliberative democracy 2. Methodological theme: Experiments and causal identification

Week 7

1. Substantive topic: Comparative Political Economy 2. Methodological topic: Selection Bias Note: Doner et al. are concerned about avoiding selection bias.

Week 8

1. Substantive topic: Domination and Resistance 2. Methodological topic: Interpretive and Post-Modern Methods Note: There are two distinct schools of thought. Scott's Weapons of the Weak (Wow) is a famous interpretative account of village life. Geertz is interpretative. Wedeen is about Syria - it's post-modern

Why Mill's Methods Presume the Existence of Only One Cause 1

1. Suppose accident can be caused either by speeding or running a red light 2. The method of difference will say speeding caused accident, if one car sped and had an accident and the other did not and did not suffer an accident, if we restrict our comparison to those 2 cases 3. However, the method of difference will also say that running the red light caused the accident, if one car ran the red light and had an accident and the other did not and did not suffer an accident, if we restrict our comparison to those 2 cases 4. In short, With multiple causes for same outcome, method of difference doesn't work

Modernisation Theory and Economic Development

1. Surprisingly little to say on nuts and bolts of economic development (capital accumulation, exchange rates, property rights, education policy, etc.) 2. Bureaucracy, impersonalism consistent even with state-socialist development That is to say, modernization theory didn't have much to say about economic development. Modernization theory at most said that Weberian bureaucracy consistent with economic development. To understand economic development, need to get away from modernization theory but not Weberian bureaucrats.

Bias

1. Systematic error or bias refers to deviations that are not due to chance alone 2. Bias has a net direction and magnitude so that averaging over a large number of observations does not eliminate its effect. In fact, bias can be large enough to invalidate any conclusions. Increasing the sample size is not going to help. In human studies, bias can be subtle and difficult to detect. Even the suspicion of bias can render judgment that a study is invalid 3. E.g. result of data skew, overestimate, underestimate, selection bias so that causal relationship is misestimated 4. We're concerned about systematic bias that works in just one direction

Sons' heights (dependent variable) vs. fathers' height (independent variable)

1. Taller fathers tend to have taller sons. 2. If you look only at tall sons, no real relationship apparent, because only the whole data set gives you the clear relationship between the two heights 3. Suppose sons are tall because of either their mom or their dad

Pressures for bureaucracy

1. Technical efficiency: it's better 2. Law: Roman (civil) law also helps Weber account for the rise of the modern state. In this system, the laws are meant to be clear enough to give guidance to judges as opposed to law arising out of precedent. Weber saw the rediscovery of Roman law in the Middle Ages as key. 3. Democracy: Weber identifies 2 mechanisms by which democracy produces bureaucracy. 1) equality before the law: bureaucracy helps operationalize this. 2) campaigning. To win an election, need to get out the vote, message, build a party infrastructure, etc. Note: the way these pressures play out differs around the world. Weber had a much more evolutionary view of history than Marx.

The Story of Cohen

1. The French [the informant said ] had only just arrived . They set up twenty or so small forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in the middle of the mountains, placing them on promontories so they could survey the countryside. But for all this they couldn't guarantee safety, especially at night, so although the mezrag, trade-pact, system was supposed to be legally abolished it in fact continued as before. 2. One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber), was up there, at Marmusha, two other Jews who were traders to a neighboring tribe came by to purchase some goods from him. Some Berbers, from yet another neighboring tribe, tried to break into Cohen's place, but he fired his rifle in the air. (Traditionally, Jews were not allowed to carry weapons; but at this period things were so unsettled many did so anyway.) This attracted the attention of the French and the marauders fled. The next night, however, they came back, one of them disguised as a woman who knocked on the door with some sort of a story. Cohen was suspicious and didn't want to let "her" in, but the other Jews said, "oh, it's all right, it's only a woman ." So they opened the door and the whole lot came pouring in. They killed the two visiting Jews, but Cohen managed to barricade himself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers planning to burn him alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so he opened the door and, laying about him wildly with a club, managed to escape through a window. 3. He went up to the fort, then, to have his wounds dressed, and complained to the local commandant, one Captain Dumari , saying he wanted his 'ar - .i.e., four or five times the value of the merchandise stolen from him. The robbers were from a tribe which had not yet submitted to French authority and were in open rebellion against it, and he wanted authorization to go with his mezrag-holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect the indemnity that, under traditional rules, he had coming to him. Captain Dumari couldn't officially give him permission to do this, because of the French prohibition of the mezrag relationship, but he gave him verbal authorization, saying, "If you get killed, it's your problem." 4. So the sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armed Marmushans went off ten or fifteen kilometers up into the rebellious area, where there were of course no French, and, sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe's shepherd and stole its herds. The other tribe soon came riding out on horses after them, armed with rifles and ready to attack. But when they saw who the "sheep thieves" were, they thought better of it and said, "all right, we'll talk." They couldn't really deny what had happened-that some of their men had robbed Cohen and killed the two visitors-and they weren't prepared to start the serious feud with the Marmusha a scuffle with the invading party would bring on. So the two groups talked, and talked, and talked, there on the plain amid the thousands of sheep. and decided finally on five-hundred sheep damages. The two armed Berber groups then lined up on their horses at opposite ends of the plain, with the sheep herded between them, and Cohen, in his black gown, pillbox hat, and flapping slippers, went out alone among the sheep, picking out, one by one and at his own good speed, the best ones for his payment. 5. So Cohen got his sheep and drove them back to Marmusha. The French, up in their fort, heard them coming from some distance ("Ba, ba, ba" said Cohen, happily, recalling the image) and said, "What the hell is that?" And Cohen said, "That is my 'ar." The French couldn't believe he had actually done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the rebellious Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, his family, not having heard from him in so long a time, thought he was dead. 6. But after a while the French released him and he came back home, but without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the town, the Frenchman in charge of the whole region, to complain. But the Colonel said, "I can't do anything about the matter. It's not my problem." 7. Fearon and Laitin: Geertz relates that in early colonial Morocco, a marauding band of Berbers attacked the home of a Jewish trader in the Maghrib named Cohen. He survived but his guests were killed and his goods stolen. Cohen could get no help from the French authorities, but he belonged to a mezrag, or trade-pact system, and he went to his insurance broker, a tribal sheikh, to demand the assistance due. The sheikh knew precisely who had Cohen's merchandise, accompanied him in a climb up the Atlas directly to the shepherd of the thief's tribe, and took control of the entire herd. The tribal warriors soon returned, saw what had transpired, and prepared to attack. But then they saw Cohen and his insurance agent, a palaver began, and Cohen peacefully regained his goods at the precise insured value. [Cohen was given sheep meant to correspond to "four or five times" his loss (Geertz 1973, 8).] Note that 'on the equilibrium path' this institutional innovation of tribal 'information brokers' would make mutually beneficial trade relationships between Jews and Berbers possible, despite problems of opportunism due to a low density of social network relations. And, in the case Geertz relates, the institution also prevented spiraling, here understood as a total breakdown of trading and relations between Jews and Berbers 8. Thus, Fearon and Laitin see this as a clear example of the "in-group policing" mechanism; they imply that the sheikh's action was motivated by incentives resembling those described in their model. So in the two cases we see (1) the sheikh imposing material (sheep-denominated) damages for a large theft and two murders and (2) the sheikh executing seven people for a trivial theft. It seems plausible that in case (2) something other than the protection of Cohen's property was at stake—perhaps the sheikh had contextual reasons of his own to show an iron fist to his tribesmen. And there's no reason that something else couldn't be at stake in case (1), as well—perhaps it was contextually important for the sheikh to intimidate the tribe in question (he did take a group of armed men with him when he went to capture the sheep). There is nowhere near enough evidence to sustain either of these interpretations—but there's not enough to impugn them, either.

Foucault's core metaphor: the panopticon

1. The basic setup of Bentham's panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners - or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren't able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation. 2. The French philosopher Michel Foucault revitalised interest in the panopticon in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. Foucault used the panopticon as a way to illustrate the proclivity of disciplinary societies subjugate its citizens. 3. He describes the prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: "He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication." 4. As a consequence, the inmate polices himself for fear of punishment. 5. Note: prisoners must act as if they're being watched because they don't know if they're being watched. Prisoners become their own jailers. Coercion is internalized and becomes almost persuasion.

What is a contrast space?

1. The choice of contrast space defines your independent variable 2. How much one thinks it's permissible to let the dependent variable vary e..g from peace to war or from potential conflict to conflict 3. Collier and Mahoney say restrict dependent variable e..g compare Norway and Sweden, not Norway and Somalia

residual

1. The difference between the observed value of the dependent variable and the predicted value 2. How much of a cause is not explained by the model

"Embedded autonomy"

1. The internal organization of developmental states comes much closer to approximating a Weberian bureaucracy. 2. Highly selective meritocratic recruitment and long-term career rewards create commitment and a sense of corporate coherence. Corporate coherence gives these apparatuses a certain kind of "autonomy." 3. They are not, however, insulated from society as Weber suggested they should be. To the contrary, they are embedded in a concrete set of social ties that binds the state to society and provides institutionalized channels for the continual negotiation and renegotiation of goals and policies. 4. Either side of the combination by itself would not work. A state that was only autonomous would lack both sources of intelligence and the ability to rely on decentralized private implementation. Dense connecting networks without a robust internal structure would leave the state incapable of resolving "collective action" problems, of transcending the individual interests of its private counterparts. 5. Only when embeddedness and autonomy are joined together can a state be called developmental. 6. This apparently contradictory combination of corporate coherence and connectedness, which I call "embedded autonomy," provides the underlying structural basis for successful state involvement in industrial transformation.

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book II, Chapter 5

1. The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. ... 2. Among democratic nations ... all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy, but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered.

Prisoners' dilemma 1

1. The prisoners' dilemma is the best-known game of strategy in social science. It helps us understand what governs the balance between cooperation and competition in business, in politics, and in social settings. 2. In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interrogating them in separate rooms. Each can either confess, thereby implicating the other, or keep silent. No matter what the other suspect does, each can improve his own position by confessing. If the other confesses, then one had better do the same to avoid the especially harsh sentence that awaits a recalcitrant holdout. If the other keeps silent, then one can obtain the favorable treatment accorded a state's witness by confessing. Thus, confession is the dominant strategy (see game theory) for each. But when both confess, the outcome is worse for both than when both keep silent

What is the prisoner's dilemma and what is a good real world example for it?

1. The prisoners' dilemma is the best-known game of strategy in social science. It helps us understand what governs the balance between cooperation and competition in business, in politics, and in social settings. 2. In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interrogating them in separate rooms. Each can either confess, thereby implicating the other, or keep silent. No matter what the other suspect does, each can improve his own position by confessing. If the other confesses, then one had better do the same to avoid the especially harsh sentence that awaits a recalcitrant holdout. If the other keeps silent, then one can obtain the favorable treatment accorded a state's witness by confessing. Thus, confession is the dominant strategy (see game theory) for each. But when both confess, the outcome is worse for both than when both keep silent 3. Tragedy of the Commons

Weber: State-building & the rise of bureaucracy

1. The starting point: prince against estates 2. "Estates" = administrators who themselves own the means of administration (offices, weaponry, etc.) and have independent "position as socially prominent people" Note: this is the second set of Weber's theories, continue to be influential. Also, under this model, a baron doesn't need to carry out the king's order, as the king has to negotiate with the baron. This is very unlike a general giving an order that has to be followed. Ambitious princes have to find some way to make the estates yield, and so Weber offers a different trajectory here.

causal effect

1. The term causal effect is used quite often in the field of research and statistics. There are two terms involved in this concept: 1) causal and 2) effect. When you look at both of these terms first individually and then together, the overall concept is easy to understand! 2. Let's look at the first word: causal. The root of this first word is cause. In order to produce something, there must be some type of cause to the situation, or there must be a reason why something is happening (referred to as the outcome). Now, keep this in mind as you look at the second word. 3. The second word is 'effect.' 'Effect' is usually brought on by a cause. Therefore, causal effect means that something has happened, or is happening, based on something that has occurred or is occurring. A simple way to remember the meaning of causal effect is: 4. B happened because of A, and the outcome of B is strong or weak depending how much of or how well A worked. 5. The outcome accounted for by a given sample

MacIntyre's parable, I

1. There was once a man who aspired to be the author of the general theory of holes. 2. When asked 'What kind of hole -- holes dug by children in the sand for amusement, holes dug by gardeners to plant lettuce seedlings, tank traps, holes made by roadmakers?' he would reply indignantly that he wished for a general theory that would explain all of these.

Outcomes and mechanisms

1. Toilet mechanism + lever press ➔ Water 2. Toaster mechanism + lever press ➔ Toast 3. Processes shaped by Indonesian politics & history + plebiscites ➔ Voter satisfaction 4. Hope of external validity = hope that experimentally tested intervention (eg lever press) embedded in same causal context. But cannot test that with experiments

Types of legitimate authority

1. Traditional: Legitimacy claimed "based on the belief in the sanctity of orders and powers of rule which have existed since time immemorial. ... The lord is obeyed on account of the particular worthiness of his person that is sanctified through tradition." (TTPT, 135) i.e. this is the way things have always been done e.g. the divine right of kings "Dieu est mon droit" on royal seals 2. Charismatic: Legitimacy claimed "on the basis of affectual [= emotional] surrender to the person of the lord and his gifts of grace, in particular[:] magical capabilities, prophecies or heroism, spiritual power and oratorical powers." (TTPT, 138) i.e. this is the most famous type and was coined by Weber. Weber argued that a charismatic form of power was about claiming some extraordinary status e.g.. I'm the only one who can fix it. Trump's claim fits under this rubric. Weber's saying that these things appeal to people. Charisma is a mutation that shakes things up. Weber believes charisma embraces particular leaders.

Independence of observations

1. Two observations are independent if the occurrence of one observation provides no information about the occurrence of the other observation. A simple example is measuring the height of everyone in your sample at a single point in time. These should be unrelated observations. However, if you were to measure one child's height over time, these observations would be dependent because the height at each time point would affect the height at future time points. 2. Assumption but not often right in social science.

Critiques of Putnam

1. Very selective history A. North's conquest of South elided i.e. Northerners obviously have a reason to like the government more, because it represented their interests and was not alien, B. What happened to fascism? a. Fascist strength correlates with civic networks (Kwon 2004, Riley 2005) i.e. vibrant civil society supported fascism, not democracy 2. Correlations don't hold within regions, only across 3. Causal mechanism unconvincing

Suppose: regression results consistent with this hypothesis

1. Viewing independent television Leads to 2. Vote for opposition In Russia in the late 1990s, it was hypothesized that this relationship held. One can say that causality runs in the other way. Support for opposition would be a confounder.

What is game theory good for?

1. Vote Buying or Turnout Buying? Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot 2. The Autocrat's Credibility Problem and Foundations of the Constitutional State 3. Whistleblowing 4. The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation 5. Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World

Fearon (1991) 1

1. We always assert a counterfactual conditional when we make a causal claim 2. There's two kinds of way of asserting what would have happened A. postulating (imagining or deducing) what would have happened B. comparing with other actual cases

Weber's "proof" that the social sciences can't attain progress

1. We choose what we want to explain based on what we're interested in 2. What we're interested in changes over time. Thus, social sciences have "eternal youth." QED (="proof done") 3. I.e. Social scientists need to stop worrying about comparisons to natural science. Values change, hence the eternal youth of social science.

What is the difference between weak and strong game theory?

1. Weak game theory: self-interest assumption relaxed 2. Strong game theory: self-interest predominates

Types of legitimate authority (legal)

1. Weber identified 3 bases. 2. Legal: "[T]he legitimacy of the power-holder to give commands rests upon rules that are rationally established... The legitimacy for establishing these rules rests ... upon a rationally enacted or interpreted 'constitution.' Orders are given in the name of the impersonal norm, rather than in the name of a personal authority..." (G&M 294-5) i.e. rationally established rules

The Argument over Science 1

1. Weber: mutable interests imply eternal youth of social sciences 2. Rejoinder: Curiousities pass, interests change, but scientific laws are forever. Let's discover the laws! e.g. before discovery of basketball, no one interested in how to score, but laws of physics don't change. 3. Ok, but in what terms are these laws going to be phrased?

Mark D. West, "Legal Determinants of World Cup Success"

1. West analyzed data from 49 countries to determine whether the origin of a nation's corporate law system, the strength of its law and order tradition as well as the solidity of its shareholder protections had any connection to its dominance or lack thereof in FIFA 2. Among other things, West found that of the nations lucky enough to advance to the World Cup finals, those whose corporate law systems had their roots in France performed extremely well 3. West, well aware of the ridiculous conclusions that such large regressions can engender, ended his paper with the caveat, "Or maybe - just maybe - some other forces are at work"

"support factors" (as per Cartwright)

1. What are 'support factors'? What we identify as a cause seldom is enough on its own to produce the targeted effect. Causes need the right support to enable them to act as expected. 2. In California, for instance, class-size reduction did not succeed in improving targeted test scores - despite the good study results in Tennessee on class size reduction. This was in large part because there were not enough qualified teachers in California to staff the increased number of classes. Small classes on their own are not enough to improve scores - good teachers for those classes are a necessary supporting factor for the small classes to work. Similarly with homework. It too needs a good many support factors before it can achieve the expected outcomes. 3. I.e. randomly replicating experiments doesn't necessarily control for support factors

An ambiguity about counterfactuals and causality 3

1. What counts as a meaningful counterfactual conditional for asserting causality? ๏ "Why didn't the French implement a successful fiscal reform before 1789?" Skocpol: "They didn't have an autonomous, bureaucratised state!" 2. Comparative political scientists don't have a successful universal answer to this question Note: Weber has the best answer to this question. He says look for causes that are meaningful to us. History is a quest for meaning. Experiments are popular because they try to resolve these issues. The model is medical experimentation, and it's very popular now.

'Historical institutionalist' political economy 2

1. What explains the distinct configurations of economic institutions in different states? A. Critical junctures B. Path dependency 2. In what ways, specifically, do economic institutions promote development? 3. Sympathetic to comparative historical sociology reaction to decline of modernisation theory i.e. Historical institutionalism is suspicious of universal theories. 4. 'Varieties of Capitalism': school within historical institutionalism. VoC looks at organizations within states. One part of historical institutionalist political economy (HIPE) looks at developmental states. Chalmers Johnson wrote the signal work.

Back to Skocpol

1. Why did France experience a political crisis and breakdown of the state in 1789? Because it A.was experiencing intense international pressure AND B.had a state penetrated by dominant classes 2. Burawoy (1989) points out that only [B] is sustained by actual-case comparison [method of difference vs. Prussia, Japan] 3. However, [A] is quite plausible considered against a counterfactual of no international pressure

Example from Skocpol

1. Why did France experience a political crisis and breakdown of the state in 1789? Because it was experiencing intense international pressure and had a state penetrated by dominant classes = 2. If France had not experienced intense international pressure [and still had a state penetrated by dominant classes], it would have not had a political crisis 2. If France [still under intense international pressure] had had an autonomous state, it would not have had a political crisis

Developmental states 1

1. Why did Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea display such remarkable success in development? 2. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982): developmental states

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground 2

1. [Man] would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. lt is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself -- as though that were so necessary -- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to make his point. ... If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated -- chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and make his point! 2. Focus on "even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to make his point."

Statistically but not substantively significant: an example

1. a man who might otherwise die at sixty-five could expect to live an extra month if he avoided saturated fat for his entire adult life. If he lived to be ninety, he could expect an extra four months. 2. [Another study] concluded that reducing saturated fat in the diet to 8 percent of all calories would result in an average increase in life expectancy of four days to two months

probabilism

1. a theory that certainty is impossible especially in the sciences and that probability suffices to govern belief and action 2. more common in large-n, though it makes it harder to control for background factors in these cases 3. Hard to do with small-n

Non-Weberian elements of developmental states: "Embedded autonomy"

1. administrative guidance: the process by which ministries use implied threats of future action or inaction in seeking a party's compliance with an administrative goal, is the primary regulatory method in Japan. Administrative guidance isn't based on stable rules. 2. "descent from heaven": "descent from heaven," amakudari as a practice shifts retired bureaucrats to industries related to the public sector work that they retired from, creating a strong bond between private and public sectors. e.g. i.e. everyone who worked at MITI graduated from the University of Tokyo. When graduate of the class of 1960 becomes the deputy minister, everyone in that class or an earlier one resigns. In the US, this is called the revolving door. In Japan, this practice is celebrated. Bureaucrats have descended from heaven (bureaucracy) into industry. This gives MITI influence over what industry does. Descent from heaven blurs the lines between the public and private sectors. Scholars respond to this argument by saying this could devolve into crony capitalism. This is what Doner et al. pose. Johnson's focus is on the postwar period.

determinism

1. all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. 2. If sufficient conditions occur, outcome occurs 3. True of a lot of small-n studies and case studies 4. Skocpol is implicitly deterministic

What is endogeneity?

1. an endogeneity problem arises when there is something that is related to your Y variable that is also related to your X variable, and you do not have that something in your model. 2. That is to say, you posit that X causes Y, but it could be that Y causes X. 3. Instrumental variables are used to deal with endogeneity. Instrumental variables can predict independent variables to estimate relationship independent of dependent variable. 4. E.g. smoking leads to cancer. There could be endogeneity/omitted variables such as unhealthy lifestyle that are correlated with both. Economists use cigarette taxes as an instrumental variable for this.

Note about Marx

1. any profits made come from the workers, because for Marx labor is the source of value from which capitalists extract surplus-value. 2. Marx believed revolution was the midwife of each phase. 3. The rising class seizes power and overthrows the preceding class structure. 4. Class struggle is zero-sum and absolute for Marx

continuous

1. can take any value 2. On a scale.

Theodicy

1. defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil 2. i.e. how is it that if God is all-powerful and good, good people get screwed?

Positivism

1. generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. 2. Comes from logical positivists. Originally meant basing theories on observable phenomena in contradisctinction to Marxism and psychoanalysis. 3. Criticism of positivism: they're being beancounters. Interpretative approaches are the least positivist. 4. Another criticism: all observations are informal and theory e.g. Olken takes exogenous plebiscites as legitimate, when they could've arisen from popular demand. 5. Use of instruments also invokes particular theories.

A core conviction behind the design of this course:

1. if you can't participate in the argument about scientific standards, you can't take advantage of what comparative politics has to offer 2. That is, need to argue about methodology. Articulate causal mechanisms and trace them out.

What is omitted variable bias?

1. occurs when a variable that is correlated with both the dependent and one or more included independent variables is omitted from a regression equation 2. The omitted variable, in other words, affects both the independent and dependent variable

omitted variable bias and "confounders"

1. occurs when a variable that is correlated with both the dependent and one or more included independent variables is omitted from a regression equation 2. The omitted variable, in other words, affects both the independent and dependent variable 3. A confounder is a third variable that can make it appear (sometimes incorrectly) that an observed exposure is associated with an outcome. In other words, a confounder is an unobserved exposure associated with the exposure of interest and is a potential cause of the outcome of interest. Confounders lead to bias that distorts the magnitude of the relationship between two factors of interest e.g. quality of institutional development may account for both growth and democracy such that growth does not lead to democracy 4. Presence of confounder is same as omitted variable 5. Need to control for the omitted variable 6. Unobserved variables present in both quantitative and qualitative research

causal mechanism (2)

1. the process between cause and outcome that links the two together 2. How the variable operates on the outcome

equifinality

1. the property of allowing or having the same effect or result from different events 2. same outcome with different causes 3. e.g. why not working class revolution for Russia, contra Skocpol? Skocpol has to tweak the Russian case through things like the relative strength of the elite. WWI set off this extra strong international pressure to set off the powerlessness of the upper class

counterfactual

1. thinking about what did not happen but could have happened 2. What would've happened without the effect: Ross doesn't engage with what would've happened without oil in the Middle East

counterfactual 2

1. thinking about what did not happen but could have happened 2. What would've happened without the effect: Ross doesn't engage with what would've happened without oil in the Middle East 3. Problem that randomization is supposed to deal with

causal interaction

1. when causes interact with one another 2. e.g. pill works only if you take a rest as well, Russian revolution may have helped lead to the Chinese revolution, Arab Spring triggered by the fall of Mubarak 3. Skocpol has 5 factors necessary for social revolution. She needs at least 32 cases to prove her point. 4. Could be that individually, causes wouldn't bring about outcome. Certain medication works only after a meal, for instance. Also car accident: nonworking brakes increase chance of accident by 20%, being drunk by 20%. But together, 100%. 5. To test interaction, test effect of a, b and a*b,

Two responses

1.Re-energise the classics Weber, Marx -> Comparative historical sociology (Barrington Moore, THEDA SKOCPOL) -> historical institutionalism

Defining comparative politics through the practice of comparative politics scholars

1.What kinds of questions do they ask? 2.What topics do they ask questions about? 3.What kinds of answers do they see as valuable? 4.How do they justify their conclusions scientifically?

Two responses 2

2. Seek new tools from other disciplines A. Deductive models from economics B. Regression and other forms of statistical analysis (econometrics) C. Experimental methods

Second response

2. Seek new tools from other disciplines A. Deductive models from economics B. Regression and other forms of statistical analysis (econometrics) C. Field experiments (last 15 years)

Path dependency

A process displays path dependency (also known as path dependence) when 1. outcomes plausible at one point become implausible later and 2. this narrowing of plausible outcomes is causally related to the process

intervening variable

A variable that explains a relation or provides a causal link between other variables.

Repeated play in game theory 3

A. If both players choose tit-for-tat, they play cooperate every round, and this is an equilibrium. Reasoning: B. If I defect, I will win round 1, but in round 2 other player is going to defect; then in Round 2 must choose: 1.I defect, and then we both defect until the end of time 2.I cooperate, and then defect in retaliation for other player's defection, and we alternate cooperation-defection until the end of time (no net payoff) 3.I cooperate, and cooperate again in round 3, and then we cooperate forever, but I have no net payoff for rounds 1 and 2, so it would have been better to just cooperate from round 1

Riley (2005) on associations and fascism 1

A. Riley shows that there's a strong correlation between civic community and fascist success. How come? B. Riley suggests that civic community offers fascists 1. Recruitment handles i.e. recruiting tool, as people are already organized 2. Organizational techniques i.e. this is pre-Facebook. C. Riley compares Spain to Italy and shows that the causal mechanism works there as well. This is the ambition. Detectives reason back from the circumstances they encounter. When reading Varshney, Chandra and Gerring, try to understand their causal mechanisms and whether their process tracing is convincing.

2. Generally: Mill's methods cannot

A. Tell us what categories we should use to describe the world B. Distinguish relevant from irrelevant similarities and differences

"Causal inference through experiments might be more solid, but they lead us away from core questions we should be asking in comparative politics." Discuss.

Answer later

"Historians have been doing process-tracing forever - comparative politics has nothing new to bring to the table with this method". Discuss.

Answer later

"Process-tracing forces us to make so many arbitrary asumptions about measurement and causality that it is inevitably unscientific." Discuss.

Answer later

Do you agree with Green et al. that "observational studies" will always be biased?

Answer later

Do you think qualitative methods can deal better with some of the issues that Cartwright highlights?

Answer later

Is Cartwright unfair to experimentalists? Could her criticisms be made about any piece of empirical research?

Answer later

Should Olken have based his paper on more theory and a broader review of existing research?

Answer later

Experiments & 'bad luck'

Any 'confounders' should be equally distributed across groups (unless really unlucky) and not obscure average causal effect or prevent successful causal identification 1. Experimentalists can and do try to test for this by comparing distribution of potentially relevant independent variables (potential confounders) across control and treatment groups 2. But: either we know the confounders, in which case no point in experimental methodology, or we don't, in which case this check is useless

Lieberson (1991) against Millian comparison

Argues that Mill's "method of difference" and "method of agreement" rely on implausible assumptions 1. a deterministic approach rather than a probabilistic one 2. no errors in measurement 3. the existence of only one cause 4. the absence of interaction effects That is to say, Mill's methods presume one cause that must be categorized when data does not give a clear answer, similar to the white powder problem.

What's a "developmental history"?

Argument about history that involves 1. unit to which it applies (usually a nation-state) 2. trajectory ("tradition" to "modernity," eg) 3. motive force

Comparative Historical Sociology

Barrington Moore (1913-2005) 1. "I got along personally with Parsons ... but I couldn't stand his ideas. They were nonsense, pretentious nonsense, too." 2. From universal process to distinct "outcomes" via "pathways" 3. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966)

Hegel

Believed each nation developed spirit through dialectic.

Varshney, Ashutosh "Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond."

Builds on two literatures reacting to failures of modernisation theory Note: modernization theory: world more rational, move from ascription to achievement. In context of ascriptive identities, language you grew up speaking, caste you grew up in, religion you grew up in.

Week 10

Can Comparative Politics Get Anywhere? Some Philosophical Issues

Why is there an affinity between dichotomous variables and deterministic explanations?

Can say with confidence that one thing led to another with a binary variable

Cartwright's version

Cartwright makes a variant of this argument when she challenges experimentalists. 1. Outcomes we care about are (at least often) the product of intricate causal mechanisms, usefully analogised to machines (like toilets or toasters) 2. Any given element in a machine might have a fairly general, abstract description (both toasters and toilets use levers), but what's crucial for their causal impact is their role in a particular machine 3. A machine is a variety of a 'value concept' — there are no scientific laws about toasters, even though you can use scientific laws to reconstruct how they work e.g. all natural laws have parameters associated with them. Many ways to chop carrots so it's tough to have laws about carrots. Mass is a law-concept. When using common CP terms, assuming generalizations is possible.

Views of causality 2

Causation as correlation (aka "constant conjunction") 1. if a, then b 2. if I put the ball in the machine, the machine will throw it Causation as correlation produced by a causal mechanism: 1. if a, then a1, then a2, then a3 ... and then b 2. if I hit the dominoes with the truck, they will fall, ..., the paint guns will fire

Views of causality 1

Causation as correlation (aka "constant conjunction") 1. if a, then b 2. if I put the ball in the machine, the machine will throw it This is the Jerry the dog view. Correlation does not equal causation. There is a complicated mechanism for transforming the independent variable into the dependent variable.

Riley (2005) on associations and fascism 2

Civic community leads to 1. Recruitment handles 2. Organisational techniques Which in turn account for Fascist success

Geddes on selection bias

Claims (p.132-133) that selecting cases based on dependent variable can cause two kinds of 'faulty inference' 1. Concluding that there is no relationship of dependent to independent variables when one exists in broader sample, as in preceding example [her 'second kind of faulty inference'] 2. Concluding that shared features of selected cases (same values on independent variable) account for shared outcomes (same values of dependent variable) [her 'first kind of faulty inference'] i.e. you see causal relationships that aren't there

Schumpeter on democracy

Classical vs. procedural definitions of democracy in Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)

Does selection bias apply to small-N studies?

Collier et al. doesn't think selection bias applies to small-n studies 1. What is the relevant population? ('Contrast space') e.g. what about revolutions? American? French? Non-obvious question in CP. 2. Is the reasoning really statistical? reasoning for small-n studies isn't statistical A. Process tracing and causal mechanisms 3. Usefulness of diagnosing extreme cases: Collier says it's useful to look at extreme cases to highlight the causal mechanisms at work

Statisticians fight back 3

Confounders not as unknowable as all that (and if they were, couldn't draw any conclusions from experimental research either)

Responses to collapse of modernisation theory

Course organized around the collapse of modernization theory 1. One response: Re-energise the classics a la Theda Skocpol with her comparative historical sociology 2. Note Weber and Marx led to A. Interpretive Anthropology (Geertz) B. Comparative Historical Sociology (Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol) Those in turn led to A. Interpretive Comparative Politics (Scott) (descendant of Geertz) B. Historical Institutionalism (descendant of Comparative Historical Sociology) Note: modernization theory argued that states resulted form internal developmental process. Modernization theorists built theory from Marx and Weber to explain development everywhere. This push was mistaken. Classics need to be applied more selectively and contextually e.g. Skocpol used Marx and Weber to explain how class struggle and state-building explained revolutions.

falsification

Criterion of falsifiability, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.

Limited external validity of experiments 1

Definition: 1. A study is 'internally valid' when it draws correct conclusions about its subject matter 2. A study is 'externally valid' when its conclusions generalise to other cases

Democracy and development after Lipset 2

Democracy could be explained by sociological preconditions 1. Moore (1966): "No bourgeois, no democracy." 2. Luebbert (1991): Varied resolutions of historically emergent cleavages: Luebbert argued that Lipset's cleavages determined democracy. Note: others argue that democracy is explained by class structures in countries (sociological conditions).

Which types of variables are usually used in Mill's methods?

Dichotomous

Answering the puzzle 1

Different outcomes depend on coercive apparatus willingness to violently repress protesters during mass uprising -- but where does this come from?

I. Domination and Resistance

Domination and Resistance

But why do they go together, per Lipset?

Economic development spreads wealth 1. Many poor, few rich leads either to oligarchy or (plebiscitarian) tyranny e.g. poor vote into office a dictator who destroys democracy 2. "Political values and style of upper class:" those who sneer at poor won't govern with them i.e. poor can govern with the rich 3. When better-off, bureaucrats can worry about rules rather than friends and family i.e. are more unbiased and less corrupt 4. Revolt reflects nothing left to lose i.e. revolt less likely to happen, so democracy more secure. But this is contradicted by rich Nazi Germany. Lipset responded to this criticism by pointing to the importance of monarchies e.g. Germany overthrew the Kaiser after WWI. Note: Lipset thought that economic development spread wealth. We now understand that it doesn't e.g. 70s to the present in the USA. Lipset also thought that wealth gave poor the ability to govern with the rich.

Week 5

Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society and Process Tracing 1. Empirical topic: ethnic conflict 2. Methodological topic: process tracing

Rise of experimentalism in political science 2

Expanding influence of 1. Ideas about the nature of causality — experiments as an attractive way of defining causality 2. Ideas about discerning causality — experiments claimed to be the only way of giving reliable statements about causal relationships

Causal mechanism, revisited

Explanation of how A leads to B leads to C

Hey computer!

Find me a formula for a line that predicts these y's using these x's

Folk theorem

Folk theorems are used in Economics especially in the field of game theory and specifically to repeated games. This theorem is said to be satisfactorily fulfilled when the equilibrium outcome in a game that is repeated an infinity number of times, is the same as the feasible and strongly individually rational outcome in the one-shot game. The outcome is said to be in equilibrium, because any attempt of trying to increase a player's individual outcome will imply a decrease in at least another player's individual outcome.

Reanimation of political culture: Putnam 2

Following Tocqueville and Banfield, suggests that vigorous associational life may promote government performance 1. de Tocqueville was really impressed by American associational life 2. Banfield had applied this idea to Italy: absence of associations explains the backwardness of Southern Italy.

Statistical Model

From Ross, "Does Oil Hinder Democracy," 2001 1. Regime, i,t = a,i + b*Oil, i, t-5 + b*Minerals, i,t-5 + b*Log Income, i,t-5 + b*lslam, i,t + b*OECD, i,t + b*Regime, i, t-5 + b*Year1... + b*Year26 2. Regime [How democratic, 0-10] = a + coefficient 3. "Dummy" = 1 if in OECD, 0 otherwise 4. Subscripts: i = individual country, t = time (year) 5. t-5 is lagging the variable 6. Need to understand the character of the project: get variables to explain something and whether this is a good idea e.g. Ross explains how good of a predictor oil wealth is of democracy. Data will be approximate. If computer can predict something, it's good. West call this into question by predicting World Cup results on the basis of legal regimes. There is no clear threshold value for R squared.

What is the difference between rational choice theory and game theory?

Game theory is a subset of rational choice theory 1. Rational choice theory is an economic principle that states that individuals always make prudent and logical decisions. These decisions provide people with the greatest benefit or satisfaction — given the choices available — and are also in their highest self-interest. i.e. people have stable, transitive preferences and act rationally. These are huge assumptions 2. Game theory: you behave rationally in strategic interaction

Relative backwardness: Gerschenkron, cont.

Gerschenkron posisted that distinct institutions emerged from late development. Early industrializers (Britain) plowed profits back into growth . Later industrializers (France, Germany) handled this capital through big banks. Even later industrializers (Russia/USSR) had to rely on the state. 1. Changing sources of finance for industrialization A. Early industrialization: self-finance (Britain) B. Later industrialization: big banks (France, Germany). Gerschenkron was painting with a broad brush here. The German story wasn't entirely about the big banks. C. Still later industrialization: state (Russia, USSR) 2. Opens up new questions A. In what ways, specifically, do states promote development? B. What explains the distinct configurations of economic institutions in different states? Note: Gerschenkron argued that timing matters for the development of nations. His work led to historical institutionalist political economy of which Hall is a leading practitioner.

Lipset 1959

Given the role of the American and French republican revolutions as the initiators of modern democratic political movements, the fact that ten out of 12 of the stable European and English speaking democracies are monarchies seems a rather ludicrous correlation. Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are kingdoms; while the only republics, which meet the twin conditions, of stable democratic procedures since democracy was instituted, and the absence of a major totalitarian movement in the past 25 years, are the United States, Switzerland and Uruguay.

From a definition of cause in terms of experiment to 'experimental absolutism' in research practice

Green and Gerber advocate experimental absolutism

MacIntyre's parable, II

He rejected [from the outset] the -- as he saw it -- pathetically common-sense view that of the digging of different kinds of holes there are quite different kinds of explanations to be given: why then he would ask do we have the concept of a hole?

Weberian bureaucracy

Here is a picture of Weberian bureaucracy. 1. Jurisdictional areas 2. Office hierarchy 3. Runs based on written documents preserved in files 4. Management based on thorough training in specialised field 5. Full-time, exclusive employment of bureaucrats 6. General rules, quite stable and nearly exhaustive

Process tracing, revisited

Here's A, here's B, demonstrating that a causal mechanism operated

Fearon (1991) 2

Hopes to relativise claims of superiority for comparing actual cases vs. postulating outcome, noting 1.Actual case strategy also relies on postulated, alternate-world claim: "If France had an autonomous state, nothing else about it relevant to its political dynamics would have been different." 2.Often possible to give good arguments about what would have happened even without an actual case for comparison

Neopatrimonialism

In neopatrimonial regimes, the chief executive maintains authority through personal patronage, rather than through ideology or law. As with classic patrimonialism, the right to rule is ascribed to a person rather than an office. In contemporary neopatrimonialism, relationships of loyalty and dependence pervade a formal political and administrative system and leaders occupy bureaucratic offices less to perform public service than to acquire personal wealth and status. The distinction between private and public interests is purposely blurred. The essence of neopatrimonialism is the award by public officials of personal favors, both within the state (notably public sector jobs) and in society (for instance, licenses, contracts, and projects). In return for material rewards, clients mobilize political support and refer all decisions upward as a mark of deference to patrons.

II. Interpretation

Interpretation

Recalling my definition of comparative politics:

It's a subdiscipline of political science that: 1. Asks causal questions 2. about political outcomes within nation-states 3. seeking answers of comparative significance 4. and engages in unending controversies about scientific standards!

What is comparative politics, anyway?

It's a subdiscipline of political science that: 1. Asks causal questions 2. about political outcomes within nation-states 3. seeking answers of comparative significance 4. and engages in unending controversies about scientific standards!

Developmental states 2

Johnson argued that MITI was a crucial part of Japanese development. Johnson came up with the term "developmental state." This is very much in line with Gerschenkron. 1. Elite bureaucracy that A. identifies sectors to be developed B. promotes rapid development in these sectors C. supervises competition with a view to ensuring profitability 2. Political system that defers to bureaucracy: For this bureaucracy to work, politics need to defer to bureaucracy. This is also distinct from a planned economy (USSR). In state socialist system, state sets prices and profitability is secondary. In developmental state, markets, particularly external ones, are key. Japanese developers tried to figure out what Western countries would buy in the future. Johnson suggest this happens through: 3. Market-conforming methods of state intervention, including among others A. administrative guidance B. "descent from heaven" 4. "Pilot organization": leads economic development a la MITI

Nationalism in modernisation theory

Karl W. Deutsch (1953): Industrialisation leads to 1. Uprooting from old identities 2. Functional need for standardised education Which together lead to Assimilation to national identity Note: for Deutsch, industrialization involved people moving from the countryside into towns as well as need for standardized education. These 2 factors lead to assimilation.

Alexander Gerschenkron

Later industrializers face context shaped by earlier industrializers (relative backwardness) 1. Borrowable technology i.e. later developers could borrow technology from developed nations e.g. Britain had to figure out how to make railway networks. Later national railroads could apply the example of the British experience. Presence of technology makes a big difference to later development. 2. Felt backwardness/military security i.e. later developers also felt pressure to develop as a result of the presence of already developed nations. 3. Labour scarcity i.e. Gerschenkron also claimed that later developers also suffered from labor scarcity. Though these nations have plenty of people, they lack skilled labor. 4. Capital scarcity i.e. If you put these three factors together, you get capital scarcity. Because of this, later developers will have no choice but to develop in a capital intensive manner. This means that they have to borrow lots of technology to make up for the serious lack of skilled labor. In short, he thought states were shaped by the tasks they faced in the course of development. Later industrializers lived in an environment shaped by earlier industrializers, unlike the convergence theory hypothesized by modernization theory.

But, do they go together? 1

Lipset says yes, if 1. Legitimacy problems solved: Monarchy

But, do they go together? 2

Lipset says yes, if 1. Legitimacy problems solved: Monarchy 2. Historically emergent cleavages "cross-cut" rather than reinforce: this is Lipset's most influential inference A. Religion e..g Protentantism vs. Catholicisim B. Citizenship and "entry into politics" e.g. most democratic countries today didn't have broad suffrage. Lipset was thinking about the disenfranchisement of the working class. C. Distributional struggles e.g. unionization, wages. Note: Lipset suggests that if these 3 things overlap, you have more intense political conflict that is difficult to reconcile in a democratic framework. This thesis was refined by Gregory Luebbert. Lipset was writing when CP was in its infancy.

Democracy and development after Lipset 1

Maybe they don't go together at all? "Bureaucratic authoritarianism," O'Donnell (1971) 1. Under "import-substitution industrialisation"(ISI) working class expands, domestic demand stimulated, economic policy popular 2. "Exhaustion" of ISI prompts squeezing of wages, unpopular policy ➔ authoritarianism Note: O'Donnell's theory of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Argentina and other places followed the ISI model, which required construction of tariff barriers and funneling of money into industry. This policy was premised on taking people away from the fields and people having high incomes to consume domestically produced goods. ISI produces middle class with high incomes. The problem is that ISI doesn't produce self-sufficient industry. To get that industry up and running, you need to import foreign capital. ISI quickly runs out of steam, as it requires smashing wages, something that is tough to sustain under democracy. P+L think that theory works only for Argentina.

Modernisation theory and a world of differences 2

Modernisation theorists recognise diversity across nation-states, but what explains it? 1. Re-animating classics: distinct trajectories, analyse via comparative historical sociology (Skocpol, Luebbert), historical institutionalism (Hall) 2. Borrowed methods: re-conceive political culture as equilibrium in game

II. Civil Society in Comparative Politics

Modernisation theory and a world of differences

A Note on Process Tracing

Need to differentiate between exogenous and endogenous variables as well as interaction and independence. 1. Independent variable: the more specific, the better 2. Nevertheless, there's a tradeoff between internal and external validity.

"No fussing or no TV"

Obviously, Woodruff wants to be able to make dinner, so he'll accede to his daughter's wishes, and his threat isn't credible.

Measuring substantive significance: what counts as a big effect? 2

One way to do it for multiple regression 1. Plug in the average (mean) value of each independent variables into the formula generated by the regression 2. Change one independent variable by one standard deviation, and see how much difference it makes

Rationalist theories of ethnic violence 1

Posen 1993: The Security Dilemma 1. Group worried about its security will arm itself 2. But this scares potential adversary, provoking conflict Note: rationalist theories connected to question of why countries ever go to war. War presents dilemma for rationalists. Barry Posen applied security dilemma to ethnic conflict. When one group arms itself, it's tough for the other group to distinguish between offensive and defensive capacity. Posen thought the same was true for ethnic conflict. i.e. arms race leads to conflict.

Did any of the previous readings have any implicit elements or assumptions of rational choice?

Posner piece as well as rent-seeking literature feature rational choice theory.

Post-modernism 1

Post-modernism: continental (especially French) reaction to decline of "grand narratives" (of which modernisation theory, especially in Marxist flavours, is an example)

R squared

R2 = share of variance (scatteredness) formula is able to explain. Closer to 1 is better

What does the lecturer care about? 1

RELATING methodological arguments to comparative politics practice 1. Do small-N comparative studies need to avoid 'selection bias' or 'cherry picking'? 2. Is game theory a useful tool for comparative politics? What are its main advantages and/or dangers?

Example

Random assignment 1. Group 1: Toilet Lever not pressed 2. Group 2: Toilet Lever pressed Results 1. Group 1: No water 2. Group 2: Water Experimentally validated result: Pressing lever leads to water release

I. Ethnic Conflict in Comparative Politics

Recall modernisation theory

III. Process tracing

Recall two views of causality 1. Jerry the Dog: I drop ball in and I get it back - no sense of intervening steps - this is the correlational view of causality 2. Ok Go Video: complicated process accounts for outcome - this is the mechanistic view

III. Experiments and causal identification

Recalling my definition of comparative politics:

Maybe there aren't any covering laws, because of reflexivity

Reflexity: humans make choices in light of knowledge of "laws"

Statistical results 1

Regime (now) = Intercept (not shown) 1. + .253 * Regime (earlier) 2. - .0346 * Oil 3. - .0459 * Minerals 4. + .922 * Income (log) 5. - .018 * Islam 6. + 1.47 * OECD

Substantive significance calculations for Ross

Regime goes from 1-10: for one standard deviation change 1. Regime (lag): 0.96 2. Oil: -0.49 3. Minerals: -0.27 4. Log Income: 1.11 5. Islam: -0.66 6. OECD: 0.54

What does the lecturer care about? 2

Relating different empirical arguments to one another E.g. Which (if any) approach to ethnic peace and ethnic conflict do you find most promising: that of Fearon & Laitin, OR Varshney, OR Posner?

Weber's developmental histories 1

Religious rationalisation 1. Unit: religious tradition 2. Trajectory: logical inconsistency, ambiguity -> logical consistency, definiteness 3. Motive force: theodicy

Why are repeated games so important in game theory?

Repeated games are important, because they mostly foster cooperation.

Positive political economy 2

Rogowski has an unconvincing theory about trade politics. For him, history is unimportant. 1. Example: Rogowski's Commerce and Coalitions (1989) A. Trade theory: expanding trade benefits owners of domestically abundant factors, hurts owners of domestically scarce factors (vice versa for contracting trade) B. Benefits usually translate into political power C. Political power used to accelerate the exogenous trends 2. For PPE, local history unimportant, vs. historical institutionalists who see 'path dependency' everywhere

Ross on substantive significance

Ross has little discussion of substantive significance. "The results suggest that the antidemocratic properties of oil and mineral wealth are substantial: a single standard deviation rise in the Oil variable produces a .49 drop in the 0-10 democracy index over the five-year period, while a standard deviation rise in the Minerals variable leads to a .27 drop. A state that is highly reliant on oil exports—at the 1995 level of Angola, Nigeria, or Kuwait—would lose 1.5 points on the democracy scale due to its oil wealth alone. A state that was equally dependent on mineral exports would lose 2.1 points."(342)

I. Very briefly on direct versus deliberative democracy

Schumpeter on democracy

Renewed interest in ethnic violence

Since 1990s, ethnic violence has driven renewed interest in this topic and modernization theory is not good at explaining it. 1. Breakup of Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (1991) 2. Hindu-Muslim strife in India (Ayodhya mosque, 1992) 3. Rwandan genocide (1994) 4. Modernisation theory offers little insight -- labour market competition hardly at issue

Post-modernism 2

Skeptical of essences: post-modernism sees "social construction" instead 1. "The self" is not a fixed, essential aspect of being human, but rather a historically emergent construction 2. "Objectivity" a claim to power, legitimised by complex social processes, rather than simple scientific neutrality definable in a straightforward way 3. I.e. Weber says people are universally vulnerable to particular appeals. Post-modernists love social construction and doubt objectivity. Classic example: Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"

Shepsle's example: median voter theorem

Spectrum 1. On one end: NRA, guns for everyone 2. In middle: Median voter, no concealed assault weapons 3. At other end: Sensible people, all guns banned Note: if you can rank preferences, median voter position will carry the day.

Weber's developmental histories 2

State-building rationalisation 1. Unit: ruling organisation 2. Trajectory: rule through notables -> modern bureaucracy 3. Motive force: efficiency, royal ambition

A real example of reflexivity

Statistical analysis demonstrates that default rates on sub-prime mortgages [taken out by borrowers not able to qualify for ordinary loans] in the U.S. are low in early-mid 2000s 1. Many more sub-prime loans get made 2. Less qualified buyers and less scrupulous brokers get drawn in 3. Default rates go up dramatically Built on shaky assumption that subprime borrowers don't default. Using this generalization undermined its validity, as new borrowers defaulted en masse.

Important things to remember about statistics

Statistical significance IS NOT substantive significance 1. Statistical significance measures: how likely is it that the apparent influence of x on y is an accident? 2. Substantive significance measures: how large is the apparent effect of x on y?

statistical significance

Statistically significant is the likelihood that a relationship between two or more variables is caused by something other than random chance.

Strategic incompetence

Strategic incompetence is the art of avoiding undesirable tasks by pretending to be unable to do them, and though the phrase was apparently only recently coined in a Wall Street Journal article, the concept is surely as old as humanity. Modern-day exemplars include the office colleague who responds to the photocopier message "clear paper jam" by freezing in melodramatic pseudo-panic until someone else steps forward to help; you're equally guilty if you've ever evaded a household task or DIY project by claiming you might screw things up. ("I'd do the laundry - I'm just worried I'll damage your clothes.") The Journal interviewed one executive who'd managed to avoid organising the office picnic for several years running. "You'd be amazed," he noted, "at how much I don't know about picnics."

Week 2

Substantive theme: development tradition Methodological theme: small-n studies

Week 11

Summing Up & Exam Preparation

But what if

Support for opposition explains 1. Viewing independent television leads to 2. Vote for opposition So that there's correlation between the two, but not causation Experimentalists think they do away with this problem of confounding variables.

interactive causal effects

The interaction of agent effects, which may be more or less than the sum of their parts

Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is an economic problem in which every individual tries to reap the greatest benefit from a given resource. As the demand for the resource overwhelms the supply, every individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others who can no longer enjoy the benefits. Generally, the resource of interest is easily available to all individuals; the tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals neglect the well-being of society in the pursuit of personal gain.

Positive political economy 1

There's also another school of thought, positive political economy. It entails very little examination of the institutions needed to create a fully free market. 1. Uses deductive rational choice theory to explain concrete economic policy choices 2. Politics understood as distributional in character A. Baseline (implicit or explicit): fully free market economy with character of "public good" B. "Rent seeking" a key concept

Lipset's summary

Things that cause democracy 1. Open class system 2. Economic wealth 3. Equalitarian value system 4. Capitalist economy 5. Literacy 6. High Participation in Voluntary Organizations Things that ensure democracy's persistence 1. Open class system 2. Equalitarian value system 3. Political apathy: if most people don't care, elites can work things out and process is self-reinforcing 4. Bureaucracy: Lipset takes this point straight out of Weber's playbook 5. Mass Society 6. Literacy

Challenges to experimentalist absolutism

This absolutist argument has implications for both large-N (not all confounders known) and small-N (why select Prussia and France) studies

An ambiguity about counterfactuals and causality 1

This sort of thinking can lead to ambiguous causality: event open to different interpretations e.g. Geertz's wink. Even if you accept description, can be hard to define a meaningful cause e.g. Trump winning has large number of causes, each of which leads down certain paths. 1. What counts as a meaningful counterfactual conditional for asserting causality? Q: "Why were you late for seminar?" A; "Some tourists couldn't figure out how to pay for their bus ticket, so it took me an extra two minutes to get here from Waterloo." A; "I was wrapped up in my paper on Max Weber so I didn't leave home early enough."

Political culture: Almond and Verba 1963

Three kinds of roles in a culture 1. citizen (participant) 2. subject (obedient) 3. parochial (apolitical) For democracy: enough 'citizens' to keep elites honest, but balanced with parochial or subject attitudes to avoid excess pressure on elites Political culture, however, could only explain so much.

Parsons' "Pattern Variables"

Tradition -> Modernity 1. ascription -> achievement 2. affectivity -> affective neutrality 3. diffuseness ->specificity (as in Weber) 4. particularism -> universalism 5. collectivity orientation -> self orientation

Ethnic conflict as byproduct of modernisation

Walker Conner (1972) modified Deutsch's narrative to account for intranational ethnic conflict. In his view: Industrialisation leads to 1. Uprooting from old identities e..g people more defined by their ethnic identities 2. Functional need for standardised education Which together lead to 1. Labour market defined in ethnic terms e.g. dominant group controls the labor market 2. Pressure on minority identities Which in turn lead to Ethnic conflict Note: same processes that Deutsch thought would lead to ethnic harmony could also lead to ethnic conflict, as the salience of identity increases

What do we do when we answer a causal question? 2

We provide (or imply) a statement in the form: if [cause] hadn't happened, [effect] wouldn't have happened

Statisticians fight back 1

We've got pretty good ways of approximating experimental methods, especially 1. 'Instrumental variables': Method of analysing fortuitous cases where assignment to 'treatment' looks uncorrelated with potential confounders (eg, look at places where independent television can and can't be received) 2. That is to say, real world gives us natural versions of randomized experiments. Absolutists would say this requires assumptions about the factors underlying natural causes and that researchers get lucky with some arbitrary assignment of treatments.

Politics & Weberian bureaucracy

Weber also discusses the politics around bureaucracy. 1. External: how bureaucracy situated in braoder social and political context e.g. in France, enarque went to École nationale d'administration. ENAs are a stable phenomenon in French political life. ENAs are very controverisal in France, because they reproduce the social hierarchy. A. Politics of staffing: potential monopolisation of opportunities i.e. there's a politics of staffing that Weber thought was essential. This is very different from Marx. B. Politics of independence: separation of bureaucrats from social context i.e. when bureaucrats are employed exclusively as such, they enjoy more independence. When appointments are based on specialized training, this is even better. 2. Internal A. Politics of information i.e. bureaucrats know stuff that the ruler doesn't. Because bureaucrats have this special knowledge, they improve on it and do an end-run on the ruler. Rulers, Weber suggests, will seek to develop independent sources of information, but that leads to the growth of the bureaucracy. 3. What bureaucracies trying to accomplish not especially interesting i.e. Weber doesn't really discuss this. Note: political economy can be a confusing term. What CP scholars mean is the study of the politics of economic policy. This is what Woodruff is discussing. Political economy used to refer to economics. Political economy can also refer to modeling strategy.

Reflections on cumulation 1

Weber: social sciences have "eternal youth" because what we care about changes over time 1. "The light given off by [humans'] highest evaluative ideas illuminates an ever-changing finite part of the monstrously chaotic stream of events that flows through time." 2. MacIntyre: "The most that any study of comparative politics based upon comparative history can hope to supply us with in the foreseeable future is de facto generalizations about what has been an obstacle to or has facilitated certain types of course of action."

An ambiguity about counterfactuals and causality 2

What counts as a meaningful counterfactual conditional for asserting causality? 1. "Why did Napoleon lose to the Russians?" "The French didn't invent atomic weapons!" 2. "Why didn't the French implement a successful fiscal reform before 1789?" Skocpol: "They didn't have an autonomous, bureaucratised state!" That is to say, we want an informative account, not French lost because they didn't nukes.

'Historical institutionalist' political economy 1

What explains the distinct configurations of economic institutions in different states? Two kinds of arguments used: 1. Critical junctures: one out of many paths selected, and the path selected influences later development. For Gerschenkron, this was industrialization. 2. Path dependency: economic institutions reflect choices made in the past e.g. QWERTY keyboard. A process displays path dependency (also known as path dependence) when 1. outcomes plausible at one point become implausible later and 2. this narrowing of plausible outcomes is causally related to the process

Example from Skocpol (1979)

Why did France experience a political crisis and breakdown of the state in 1789? 1. Intense international pressure created need for revenue, prompted effort at tax reform 2. Landed-commercial upper class had leverage in state machinery, resists reform

Puzzle

Why did the Iranian regime successfully repress mass protests in 2009, while the Egyptian regime did not in 2011?

Domination and Resistance 1

Why do people submit to those that dominate them (tell them what to do)? Straightforward answer (eg Etzioni 1961): dominant figures have three types of power 1. Coercive [sticks / whip]: threat of punishment 2. Remunerative [carrots / cookies]: incentives 3. Normative (symbolic) [persuasion, legitimacy]: it's right to obey these people Forms of domination have implications for domination

Interpretation

Why is that man chopping wood? Max Weber says look for "context of meaning" 1. Rational choices, but it's the context of choice that gives insight A. Working for a wage B. Wants firewood C. Exercise 2. Could also be working off a fit of rage NB: physical description of act not enough. Compare discussion of winks and twitches in Geertz 3. Interpretation at best a "peculiarly plausible hypothesis." Note: can't know by physical description alone. 4. Need Geertz's "thick description": sufficient description to explain occurrences e.g. red light means stop, not car coming to a halt.

Getting Ready for School Game

Woodruff, like Przeworski, has specified players, preferences and moves. The points are nodes. 1. Sasha wants her hair braided 2. Woodruff wants to get to leave earlier rather than later. 3. Sasha is the first mover. Either she can accept the default hairstyle and the game comes to an end or she can request a braid. If she requests a braid, Woodruff can either do it for her or deny it. If Woodruff denies, she'll make a fuss and they'll leave late or she'll accept the default hairstyle. This is the game in extensive form.

time-series

a collection of observations of well-defined data items obtained through repeated measurements over time

Causal mechanism

a step-by-step explanation of how a given cause produces a given result

Intervening variable(s)

describe intermediate steps in a causal chain (basis for security service affiliation to regime)

A core conviction behind the design of this course

if you can't participate in the argument about scientific standards, you can't take advantage of what comparative politics has to offer

A core conviction behind the design of this course:

if you can't participate in the argument about scientific standards, you can't take advantage of what comparative politics has to offer

independent variable

is what is varied during the experiment; it is what the investigator thinks will affect the dependent variable.

II. Comparative politics' wrong turn

modernisation theory

Cherry-picking

selection on both dependent and independent variable

Selection bias

selection on dependent variable

additive causal effects

the combined effect produced by the action of two or more agents, which may be more or less than the sum of their parts

Null hypothesis

the null hypothesis is straightforward -- what is the probability that our treated and untreated samples are from the same population (that the treatment or predictor has no effect)

Social capital

transmissible reputational information

Independent variable(s)

what does the explaining; the causes (revolutionary versus nonrevolutionary regime origin)

Dependent variable

what one is trying to explain (successful or failed repression of mass uprising)

Statistical Model in Linear Regression

y = a + βx + ε with 1. a = intercept 2. β = coefficient 3. ε = error term 4. This is a formula for a line

Answering the puzzle 2

Causal mechanism is a set of steps that explains how causes produce an outcome 1. Regime origin. Iran 1979: borne of tough circumstances and chaos. Egypt 1952: little violence, little transformation, monetary inducements 2. Character of coercive apparatus (military and security forces). Nature of regime origin makes the coercive apparatus way more willing to stomach violence in Iran than in Egypt. 3. Coercive apparatus readiness to violently repress protesters during mass uprising, the last step in the chain. This is a method of difference explanation with many confounding variables.

dependent variable

is what will be measured; it's what the investigator thinks will be affected during the experiment.

Further difficulties with Mill's Methods

1. "Many variables, small N": it's hard to explain what exactly accounted for the difference in outcome 2. In the method of difference, what counts as a negative case? (Positive: revolution, negative: no revolution?) e.g. Skocpol doesn't fully account for the places where revolutions didn't occur. Even the experimental method isn't perfect. So why do comparative politics?

Modernising effects of transition to capitalism 2

1. "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." (Communist Manifesto) 2. I.e. capitalism creates a situation in which social differences are less absolute than before, and so the social order is simplified. What matters is the cash you have.

Marxist developmental history

1. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." ('Communist Manifesto') 2. Evolving class struggle driven by technical change: A. Feudalism: Bourgeoisie vs. Aristocracy (landlords) B. Capitalism: Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat (workers) C. Communism: Proletariat wins! 3. Transition from one mode of production to the next requires revolution Note: the bourgeoisie for Marx means merchants (early) and industrialists (later). These people take money and makes more money off of labor, and so workers have nothing to lose but their chains, as they don't own any capital and have no access to subsistence agriculture.

3. What kinds of answers do comparative politics scholars see as valuable?

1. A valuable explanation of a political outcome relies on arguments that are at least potentially relevant in more than one case (in other words, a good answer has "comparative significance") 2. e.g. Nazism, because Hitler is a bad guy makes for a bad answer. Explanation that's potentially relevant in more than one case is sought after. Even unique events can have a common cause, and analogies can be useful.

Benjamin A. Olken, "Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia"

1. This article presents an experiment in which 49 Indonesian villages were randomly assigned to choose development projects through either representative-based meetings or direct election-based plebiscites. 2. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. 3. Changing the political mechanism had much smaller effects on the actual projects selected, with some evidence that plebiscites resulted in projects chosen by women being located in poorer areas. The results suggest that direct participation in political decision making can substantially increase satisfaction and legitimacy.

Stanley Lieberson, "Small N's and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases"

1. An increasing number of studies, particularly in the area of comparative and historical research, are using the method of agreement and method of difference proposed by Mill (1872) to infer causality based on a small number of cases. 2. This article examines the logic of the assumptions implicit in such studies. For example, the research must assume: (1) a deterministic approach rather than a probabilistic one, (2) no errors in measurement, (3) the existence of only one cause, and (4) the absence of interaction effects. These assumptions are normally inappropriate, since they contradict a realistic appraisal of most social processes, but are mandatory if we follow Mill's causal analyses based on small N's. 3. Research should not attempt employment of such methods in small-N cases without a more rigorous justification of heroic assumptions and a guard against possible distortions.

Ambiguity of experimental logic 1

1. Any one of the many differences between the cases could explain contrasting outcomes A. Metal measuring spoon vs plastic measuring spoon, red bowl/pitcher vs blue bowl/pitcher B. Egypt vs Iran: Borders the Mediterranean Sea vs borders the Caspian Sea, speak Arabic vs speak Farsi, pyramids vs no pyramids, etc. 2. Some a priori thinking, prior knowledge required 3. I.e. LWL looking at how similarities conceal differences.

Ambiguity of experimental logic 2

1. Apparent similarities may be actually conceal causally important differences A. In both cases, white powder was added to the vinegar. Thus, the white powder has no role in explaining the reaction in one case B. In both cases, powerful and well-funded security and military apparatus. Thus, security and military apparatus has no role in successful repression in one case 2. What's wrong?

Lisa Wedeen, "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria"

1. Argued that all Syrians in the 1990s were complicit in upholding the regime by participating in various forms of public spectacle with no inner conviction. 2. In the spring of 1989 the elite Syrian Presidential Guard discharged Officer M after breaking some of his bones. A young officer from a lower middle class, M had expected his university education to secure him power and privilege ranks. He was mistaken. His commanding officer showed no particular accomplishments and even prior to the incident that occasioned his beating, often heard him crying in his sleep. 3. One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the soldiers their dreams of the night before. A soldier stepped forward and announced: "I saw the image of the leader in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it." A second soldier followed suit: "I saw the leader holding the sun in his hands, and crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness blanketed the face of the earth. illuminated the sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions." Soldier followed solider, each extolling the leader's greatness. When M's turn came, he saluted the visiting officer, and said: "I saw that my mother is a prostitute in your bedroom." The beating and the discharge followed. Commenting retrospectively on his discharge, M explained that he had "meant my country is a w***e." 4. In "The Power of the Powerless," Vaclav Havel discusses a gesture of obedience in "post-totalitarian" Czechoslovakia in ways that suggest parallels with the complicity of M's soldiers in "authoritarian" Syria. To question a common practice under the Czechoslovak communist regime, Havel uses the example of a green-grocer displaying the slogan, "Workers of the World, Unite!," in his shop window. Havel postulates that the grocer displays the slogan not because he believes that the workers should unite but, rather, because "these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life 'in harmony with society', as they say." The slogan functions as a "sign," according to Havel, signifying the grocer's obedience and his desire to be left in peace, but not his belief in communist principles. 5. The examples drawn from theoretical reflections on other cases, from views conducted in Syria, and from M's story demonstrate different levels obedience: from the passive compliance of the green grocer with a poster shop window, to the Syrian soldiers and Iraqi leaders who are forced into lies to torturers and party members wielding the weapons of state power. For Havel, the obedience of people who are not required to believe ideological "mystifications" but only to act as if they do reproduces a system that relies on, is defined by, passive compliance. The division between ruler and ruled "runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both victim and a supporter of the regime." 6. A politics of "as if' registers the soldiers' complicity and the regime's power. But like all demonstrations of obedience, inducing complicity by enforcing public dissimulation also has its limitations. First, behavior that encourages awareness of one's complicity reminds each soldier that he and the regime at odds, that a gap exists between performance and belief. Second, although this gap affirms the regime's power to induce complicity, complicity itself registers the regime's reliance on participants to uphold the system. Third, requiring ciizens to act "as if' leaves the regime in the predicament of having to evaluate popular sentiment through the prism of enforced public dissimulation. Ritual dissimulation allows Syrians to keep their internal thoughts private. Fourth, as M's example shows, professions of complicity sometimes become opportunities for subtle mockery or even outright rebellion

Ashutosh Varshney, "Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond"

1. Ashutosh Varshney's book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India joins Paul Brass's 1998 study Theft of an Idol, which identifies 'institutionalized riot systems' as a key variable in the production of Hindu-Muslim violence. Ashutosh Varshney's book makes three important contributions to this collective body of research. 2. The first contribution of the book is the identification of localised variations in the pattern of ethnic violence. The book is based upon an original dataset, constructed in collaboration with Steven Wilkinson, which provides the most systematic data that we have so far on Hindu-Muslim violence in post-colonial India. Varshney shows that such violence is highly concentrated in nature: it occurs in towns rather than villages, in some towns rather than others, and in some neighbourhoods within these towns rather than others. Further, he argues that we should expect such localised variation in the incidence of ethnic violence in other countries as well, and correctly points out that much of the theoretical literature on ethnic violence fails to account for such variation. 3. Second, the book constitutes an advance over the instrumentalist approach to Hindu-Muslim violence developed by Brass in Theft of an Idol. According to Brass, any one of a number of 'exogenous shocks' may become the precipitating event for a riot - a clash of processions, the rape of a Hindu woman, the poisoning of a cow, a scuffle and so on. Given this 'exogenous shock', a riot is most likely to take place when two conditions are met. First, politicians must polarise Hindus and Muslims, aided by an 'institutionalised riot system' consisting of cultural organisations, criminals, social activists and others. Second, local and state governments must fail in checking the polarising actions of politicians. Brass does not, however, identify the conditions under which politicians choose to polarise or moderate, nor does he specify the conditions under which the state will be more or less effective in checking polarisation. Varshney accepts Brass's argument, but takes us beyond it. Working within the same framework as Brass, he pushes us to ask further questions. What are the conditions under which political elites will be more or less likely to play a polarising strategy? And what are the conditions under which the state will be more or less effective in checking such polarisation? 4. The book pursues the answer through a controlled comparison of three pairs of towns in India, one in each pair violent, the other peaceful: Aligarh and Calicut; Hyderabad and Lucknow; and Ahmedabad and Surat. The towns in each pair are described as being comparable in key respects but different in the incidence of riots. Varshney supplements his analysis of these three pairs by looking, less intensively, at temporal variations in patterns of violence in Ahmedabad and Surat before and after the 1940s. He finds that, within each pair, inter-communal civic engagement between Hindus and Muslims is the key variable influencing both politicians' choice of a polarising strategy as well as the effectiveness of the state in quelling tensions before they escalate into a riot. Where they exist, such networks assist the state in defusing polarising strategies when they are adopted. Further, Varshney argues, those politicians who might otherwise have engaged in polarisation moderate their strategies pre-emptively, knowing in advance that they will not be effective. The mechanism through which intercommunal associations prevent successful polarisation is as follows: such associations create trust by bringing individuals belonging to different ethnic groups into repeated contact. When local 'riot entrepreneurs' initiate an incident intended to 'spark' a riot, these associations are able to function as conduits of credible information to members of both communities and the state about the perpetrators, and prevent such a strategy from succeeding. Consequently, towns with vibrant inter-communal associations exhibit low levels of violence. In those towns where such associations do not exist, politicians have a free hand in polarising the population, and the state is ineffective in checking them. Consequently, such towns are marked by high levels of Hindu-Muslim violence. Based on these paired comparisons of Indian towns, Varshney proposes that a research programme that systematically investigates the links between civil society and ethnic conflict should lead to a better understanding of the local and regional variations in patterns of ethnic violence not only in India but more generally.

Comparative politics is a subdiscipline of political science that

1. Asks causal questions 2. about political outcomes within nation-states 3. seeking answers of comparative significance 4. and engages in unending controversies about scientific standards!

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, "Complements in the Quest for Understanding Comparative Politics"

1. Bueno de Mesquita, by contrast, not only believes that universal generalizations exist, but lists a considerable number of candidates for this status. 2. Adam Przeworski et al. (2000) have shown that democratic societies with per capita incomes above a threshold level (about $6,000 per capita) are immune from coups and remain stable and democratic while democratic polities below that income cut-point often backslide into dictatorship. Przeworski et al. have demonstrated that this important empirical regularity does not seem to vary across space or (correcting for inflation) across time. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) provide a general theoretical explanation for Przeworski et al.'s finding and also demonstrate theoretically and empirically how rules for choosing and maintaining leaders - including rules in non-democratic settings - shape such seemingly diverse phenomena as the quality of drinking water, the longevity in office that leaders experience, the flow of immigrants and emigrants, educational attainment levels, variation in per capita income, war-fighting policies and war-fighting success or failure, predictability or uncertainty in economic growth rates, and the extent to which corruption and kleptocracy is experienced.

Valerie Bunce, "The Geography of Generalization"

1. Bunce counsels both modesty about making universal claims and a strategy of hedging our bets. 2. She would feel more confident about universal claims if they were backed by multimethod testing, especially because what may appear to be universal tendencies using one method will probably be revealed as a variety of processes when studied with other methods

Weber's Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism (1905) (2)

1. Calvinist predestination doctrine one example of religious rationalisation 2. Predestination → fear over whether 'elect' → interrogation of self for signs of strong will →methodical capitalist accumulation 3. Isn't this all just 'ancient history' now? The 'iron cage' or 'steel-hard casing'.

This is a pretty broad definition

1. This is analogous to asking what rock music is. 2. Need to answer this question historically, as Jack Black did in "School of Rock." 3. If you listen to interviews of musicians, they'll draw inspiration from different influence. 4. Progress in CP is much more like progress in music than in physics: new things that are not necessarily better.

To recapitulate:

1. Defined comparative politics as a subdiscipline of political science that asks causal questions about political outcomes within nation-states, seeking answers of comparative significance, and argues interminably about scientific standards 2. The powder-vinegar experiment discussion demonstrates that there's no obvious or trivial way to resolve these arguments with an appeal to 'scientific method'

Recap

1. Definition of comparative politics 2. Mill's methods of difference and agreement 3. Ambiguities of experimental logic 4. Independent, dependent, intervening variables 5. Causal mechanisms 6. Process tracing

What do classes struggle about? 'Surplus extraction'

1. Economic value derives from labour 2. Each (pre-socialist) form of society involves "an association against a subjected producing class" that allows ruling class to extract surplus value A. In feudalism, method of surplus extraction is direct coercion B. In capitalism, method of surplus extraction is wage labour

Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, "The Underprovision of Experiments in Political Science"

1. Field experimentation enables researchers to draw unbiased and externally valid causal inferences about social processes. 2. Despite these strengths, field experimentation is seldom used in political science, which relies instead on observational studies and laboratory experiments. 3. This article contends that political scientists underestimate the value of field experimentation and overestimate their ability to draw secure causal inferences from other types of data. 4. This article describes and explains the underprovision of randomized research, with special reference to our own field of political science. 5. Our argument is that field experimentation is underutilized even in areas where it ethically unencumbered. Underprovision appears to result from apprehension of the relative value of experimental and observational. 6. Building on the Bayesian analysis of Gerber, Green, and Kaplan that uncertainty about bias undercuts the value of observational research.

Jean Lachapelle, Lucan A. Way, Steven Levitsky, "Crisis, Coercion, and Authoritarian Durability: Explaining Diverging Responses to Anti-Regime Protest in Egypt and Iran."

1. Focusing on Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011, this paper examines the role of the coercive apparatus in responding to crises triggered by mass anti-regime protest. 2. We argue that the divergent outcomes of the two crises - authoritarian resilience in Iran and regime breakdown in Egypt - can be traced to the regimes' distinct origins. 3. On the one hand, the Iranian Islamic regime's founding in sustained, violent, and ideologically driven struggle (1978-1983) created a regime elite and coercive apparatus with the stomach and capacity for high intensity coercion necessary to defend the regime against mass-based threats. Revolution, counter-insurgency, and war during the regime's early years led to the growth of an ideologically motivated and highly partisan security services. 4. In Egypt, by contrast, the absence of origins in violent, revolutionary struggle led to the creation of a coercive apparatus with weaker, more situational cohesion. The regime's overall coercive capacity was high, but in the absence of a revolutionary heritage, the willingness of the repressive apparatus to suppress large-scale, mass protest was more open to question than in Iran.

Weber's Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism (1905) (1)

1. Where did the emotional energy for a specifically capitalist attitude toward accumulation come from? Why did it appear only in the West? 2. Answer: Calvinism, Protestantism more generally A. Religious rationalisation driven by problem of theodicy: explaining why bad things happen to good people, and vice versa

Peter A. Hall, "Adapting Methodology to Ontology in Comparative Politics"

1. From this perspective, the value of single case studies and small-n research designs is that they provide the terrain for the application of a method that I call 'systematic process analysis'. It bears a strong resemblance to methods described by Campbell (1975) as "pattern matching" and by George and McKeown (1985) as "process tracing". It is far from new and has long been practiced, in proximate if rarely exact form, by many scholars (cf. Moore 1969; Skocpol 1979; Collier and Collier 1991). But this method is undervalued by a field mesmerized by a standard regression model whose limitations are now becoming clear. 2. The basic point should be clear. Systematic process analysis entails the development of a causal theory, extracting predictions from it about what should be observed if the causal processes it posits are present in the cases, and examination of a diverse set of observations drawn from those cases with a view to assessing whether those predictions are born out or not. Observations bearing on the shape of the causal processes present in the case provide a test of the theory that is at least as stringent and relevant as do observations about the correspondence between the values taken by a small set of causal variables and the dependent variable, even when the main object is to identify such a small set of 'causal variables'. Given the movement in comparative politics toward causal theories that envision multiple interaction effects, however, this method has become especially useful. The validity of arguments about path dependence or strategic interaction can often be assessed only by comparing predictions about causal processes to observations of such processes in the cases at hand. 3. When should scholars apply systematic process analysis and when should they use regression analysis? Much will depend on the character of the theories to be tested and the ontologies they imply. Standard regression methods will be especially useful when the cases available are large in number and genuinely independent of each other, the relevant outcomes heavily dependent enough on a small set of causal variables highly-independent of each other and so powerful that their impact shows up consistently across cases, and the relevant interaction effects limited enough that they can be modeled with the available degrees of freedom. In many studies, statistical techniques may be useful for assessing some aspects of the causal relations specified by a theory, while systematic process analysis is employed to test other aspects of those relations.

Developmental histories, 18th-20th centuries

1. GWF Hegel, 1807, development of "spirit": in turn influenced 2. Karl Marx, 1840s-1883, feudalism to capitalism, to socialism: in turn influenced 3. Max Weber, 1890s-1920; rationalisation, bureaucratisation

Theda Skocpol, "States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France, Russia and China"

1. Her recent work, States and Social Revolutions, is an impressive examination of the causes and consequences of social revolution in France, Russia, and China. On the basis of these three cases, she develops a general structural model of social revolution and issues a strong challenge to existing perspectives on revolution, especially the Marxian one. 2. Social revolutions, Skocpol writes, are "rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below." 3. There are two critical elements in this definition. First, the transformation must be both social and political; social revolutions are distinct from rebellions, revolts, and political revolutions in that social revolutions require a successful transformation not only of the polity but also of the social bases of political power 4. Second, this transformation must include a popular uprising; social revolution involves more than change engineered from above by an elite. 5. Skocpol identifies three social revolutions, those occurring in late 18th-century France, early 20th-century Russia, and China in the first half ofthe 20th century. 6. She examines each of these three cases within a comparative framework, noting, on the one hand, their similarities with each other and, on the other hand, their differences from selected cases of non-revolutionary change or failed revolutionary attempts-England in the 17th century (a political revolution), Prussia in the early 1800s and Japan in the late 1860s (transformations from above), and Germany in 1848 and Russia in 1905 (failed revolutions). 7. In so doing, Skocpol identifies three stages of revolution: the collapse of the old-regime state, mass mobilization of the peasantry into class-based uprisings, and the reconsolidation of state power by a new elite. At each stage, specific structural factors directly determine social outcomes. 8. Revolutions begin with the weakening or outright collapse of the existing state structure. The state collapses not because of revolutionary action from within (this follows rather than precedes state collapse), but because of several structural pressures. Revolutionary political crises have occurred, according to Skocpol, in relatively weak states faced with military or economic competition with stronger states in the context of unevenly developed international economic and political systems. Confronted with military collapse and/or fiscal crisis, the state seeks to strengthen itself through relevant reforms, such as ending the tax privileges of the upper classes or acquiring direct control over the agricultural surplus. 9. Political crisis is necessary for revolution, but it is not sufficient. Social revolutions arise from a conjuncture of political crisis and widespread peasant revolt aimed at the landed upper class. 10. Once the state has been weakened and peasant uprisings have occurred, the main activity of revolution is the reconsolidation of state power by a previously marginal political elite. The general outcome of revolution is the creation of a stronger, more bureaucratic, more highly centralized state.

David Woodruff, "Understanding Rules and Institutions: Possibilities and Limits of Game Theory"

1. I wish to make three points, focusing on understanding the intersection of rules (like those of the trade pact) and context. 2. First, as just illustrated, the incentives that shape people's actions in relation to a single rule can be different in different situations. People can do the same thing—obey a rule, or enforce a rule, or violate a rule—for different reasons. The mere articulation of a rule that could allow formally rational action does not ensure that formal rationality governs in practice. 3. My second point is that the potential relevance of case-specific incentives to rules has important empirical implications, affecting how we conceive the processes that allow institutions to create order. 4. Third, even those who accept rational choice as a working assumption should conclude that game theoretic methods of describing situations have little advantage when there are distinct contextual incentives for conformance to rules in distinct circumstances. Game theory is only powerful when the real-world incentives for conforming to rules are general and formal rationality governs. When substantive rationality looms large, game theory is at best not very powerful; at worst, the presumption that game theory will be powerful can obscure some of the key processes by which order gets built.

Alasdair MacIntyre, "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?"

1. In his provocative essay, "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?," Alasdair MacIntyre argues that students of politics confront an insurmountable obstacle in their efforts "to advance and to test genuine, law-like, cross-cultural generalizations." This obstacle resides in the indissoluble link that binds together political institutions and cultures. Political institutions can not be studied in isolation from the political cultures in which they function, while political cultures can not be studied in isolation from the political institutions which give them expression. Because of this unbreakable association between institutions and cultures, all political systems must be considered fundamentally idiosyncratic, thus rendering unattainable the ambition of discovering laws of political behavior that are entirely free of system-specific considerations. 2. McIntyre, however, suggests a way around this obstacle by inviting the scholar to begin, not "by collecting data in the hope of formulating causal generalizations," but rather "by looking at cases where a will to achieve the same end was realized with greater or lesser success in different cultural contexts." He concludes, "What we shall achieve if we study the projects springing from such intentions are two or more histories of these projects, and it is only after writing these histories that we shall be able to compare the different outcomes of the same intention."

Limited role for state

1. In historical emergence of capitalism, state serves as instrument of "primary [primitive] accumulation," creating landless proletariat compelled to labour for a wage 2. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs ofthe whole bourgeoisie." (Communist Manifesto) 3. I.e. Marx viewed the state as a secondary matter, an epiphenomenon. The state just helps bring the bourgeois rise to dominance and is just an instrument in the class struggle.

Process-tracing 1

1. Involves following the steps in the causal mechanism, demonstrating that each is taking place A. Intervening variables, not just dependent and independent variables, relevant 2. I.e. need to expand analysis beyond independent variable (doing explaining) and dependent variable (being explained) and look at intervening variables as well, which serves as both independent and dependent variables 3. CP scholars can't agree what is adequate detail for process-tracing.

Process-tracing 2

1. Involves following the steps in the causal mechanism, demonstrating that each is taking place A. Intervening variables, not just dependent and independent, relevant 2. Much disagreement in practice about what constitutes adequate detail e.g. LWL paper not accepted, because it lacks details and enough cases. Comparisons allow for meaningful contrast. 3. "Very plausible" standard may help in judging

James C. Scott, "Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance"

1. James Scott spent nearly two years (1978-1980) in a small rice-farming community, which he calls "Sedaka," in the principal paddy-growing area of Kedah, Malaysia. From his experiences among seventy-odd Malay households, and from reading, remarkable for both its depth and breadth, Scott has fashioned an account of relations between well-to-do villagers and poorer villagers that is both rich in detail and informed by important theoretical concerns. The book offers a powerful critique of the concept of hegemony-of ideological domination-as it has been employed by such Marxist scholars as Gramsci, Althusser, Miliband, Poulantzas, Habermas, and Marcuse, and it is an impressive contribution to the literature on peasant society, class consciousness, and revolution. 2. Scott's analysis begins with two facts. First, peasant rebellions, let alone peasant "revolutions," have been few and far between. Second, during the times of quiescence that dominate the historical record, the public life of villages has usually been marked by consensus and accommodation, with the village poor generally conforming to elite standards for seemly behavior 3. The investigation begins with the reactions of rich and poor in Sedaka to the "green revolution." The Muda Irrigation Project, completed in 1973, made possible the double-cropping of rice. The introduction of the combine-harvester a few years later made possible increased efficiency and profitability. A majority of the villagers of Sedaka have been made better off, but the incomes of the poorest households have been driven lower. The rising price of paddy land has prevented the poor from acquiring more land of their own; at the same time, mechanization has reduced their opportunity to earn wages by transplanting, cutting, and threshing for others. As Scott observes, the poor could interpret these facts in a variety of ways: the facts could be accepted fatalistically in the manner of a natural disaster; they could be seen as Allah's punishment for straying from the true faith; they could be seen as the result of the greed of outside, Chinese syndicates (owners of the combine-harvesters), or as the product of malevolent government policy. Instead, the poor have focused on the local rich. In particular, they have focused on the contempt and disrespect they see implicit in the tendency of the rich to cut back on the various forms of religiously inspired gift-giving and public feasting that have traditionally joined the rich to the poor and that have constituted the principal ritual life of the village. This focus, according to Scott (and here I wish that the poor had been allowed to speak for themselves at greater length), was a matter of choice, of strategy. Although the poor understand the new possibilities offered by double-cropping and mechanization, they have chosen to adopt a perspective that emphasizes moral lapses, selfishness, and the violation of social decencies by the rich because, on this terrain, they see a possibility of actually producing a desired effect. The poor of Sedaka, then, hardly appear to be the victims of "mystification." Moreover, Scott makes a plausible case that their malicious gossip about the rich should be seen as "ordinary class struggle" (and that the gossip of the rich about the poor-that they are lazy, unwilling to work, and undeserving of traditional forms of charity-should be seen in a similar light). 4. The concept of "ordinary class struggle" is an important element of Scott's analysis. The struggle by the rich, as Scott sees it, to free themselves from past social obligations in order fully to enjoy the profits of the green revolution and the efforts of the poor to resist this eventuality have put nary a dent in the outward harmony of the village. The war of words is not conducted face to face, but "backstage" among friends. Activity beyond words takes the form of foot dragging, pilfering, arson, sabotage, and individual boycotts. In contact with the rich, the poor continue to be appropriately deferential, conforming, and submissive. The mass, open, even violent behavior we normally associate with class struggle is entirely absent. Scott provides an excellent discussion of obstacles to this latter sort of class struggle in Sedaka, thereby convincing us of the need for the concept "ordinary class struggle"-of the need to see the "small" events he describes as large in their potential political significance

What's wrong?

1. Possibly: Preconditions (aka "independent variables") incorrectly described as "the same" when they are not A. White powder ➔ baking soda or flour B. Strong security forces ➔ Security forces with tight ideological links to authoritarians or security forces with merely material links to authoritarians 2. Note, however, that these redescriptions of independent variables rely on understanding causal mechanisms A. Problem of ambiguous experiment can be solved not by better description, but only by postulating and process tracing of causal mechanism

Predestination

1. Predestination is the doctrine that God alone chooses (elects) who is saved. He makes His choice independent of any quality or condition in sinful man. He does not look into a person and recognize something good nor does He look into the future to see who would choose Him. He elects people to salvation purely on the basis of His good pleasure. Those not elected are not saved. He does this because He is sovereign; that is, He has the absolute authority, right, and ability to do with His creation as He pleases. He has the right to elect some to salvation and let all the rest go their natural way: to hell. This is predestination. 2. This could be a very discouraging doctrine: nothing can save me from hell. 3. Calvinists are famously strict: it'd be good to know whether you're saved or not. Calvinists developed ways to divine strong will. 4. Weber described this mechanism of incredible striving because of constant fear. This mechanism leads to methodical capitalism accumulation. Social scientists still puzzle over these questions. Calvinism wasn't just as influential in 1905.

process-tracing

1. Process tracing is a fundamental tool of qualitative analysis. 2. it is defined as the systematic examination of diagnostic evidence selected and analyzed in light of research questions and hypotheses posed by the investigator. 3. Process tracing can contribute decisively both to describing political and social phenomena and to evaluating causal claims.

1. Comparative politics asks causal questions -- why did things turn out the way they did?

1. Questions of description -- what happened -- generally only preliminary to a search for causal explanation 2. Generally does not pose normative/evaluative questions (what's best?) However, research may have implications for normative questions, eg, what policies would best promote some aim I.e. comparative politics asks about outcomes, the way something happened e.g. ethnic conflict, revolutionary success. Outcomes have a number of meanings and the constraint is that outcomes are centered in a nation-state and compared across nation-states.

Applying the method of difference

1. Reagents can't be causes 2. Possible causes are the bowl, pitcher and spoon

Answering the puzzle 3

1. Regime origin affects the Character of coercive apparatus A. Iran: revolution (1979). Civil war; suspicion of existing military; creation of new, ideologically committed security apparatus B. Egypt: military coup (1952). Limited violence; limited transformation of coercive apparatus; security services loyalty based on material incentives

Richard F. Doner, Bryan K. Ritchie, Dan Slater, "Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective"

1. Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements. 2. This article introduces and assesses a new political explanation for the origins of "developmental states"—organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation. 3. Conventional wisdom holds that developmental states in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore result from "state autonomy," especially from popular pressures. 4. We argue that these states' impressive capacities actually emerged from the challenges of delivering side payments to restive popular sectors under conditions of extreme geopolitical insecurity and severe resource constraints. Such an interactive condition of "systemic vulnerability" never confronted ruling elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand—allowing them to uphold political coalitions, and hence to retain power, with much less ambitious state-building efforts.

Implications for "experimental design"

1. Seeking "just one difference" may actually be counterproductive 2. Appropriate number of cases ("N") not determined by logical requirements of inference 3. Two cases can be enough

Kenneth A. Shepsle, "Arguments about Theory... Again"

1. Shepsle adopts a nuanced view that universals exist, but must be properly understood as being true only under precisely defined conditions, conditions which may not ever be completely satisfied in the observable world. 2. They can nevertheless be approximately true, and also improved by cross-fertilization with middle-range approaches, just as the latter are enriched by interactions with universal theorizing.

A very broad range of political outcomes

1. States and State Formation; Political Consent 2. Political Regimes and Transition 3. Political Instability, Political Conflict (revolutions, civil wars, protest movements) 4. Mass Political Mobilization (parties and party systems, clientelism, activism) 5. Processing Political Demands (constitutions, coalitions) 6. Governance (political economy, mostly)

Adam Przeworski, "Democracy and the market: political and economic reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America"

1. Stylized world populated by collective organizations, latent groups that might become organized, and individual voters who can reward/punish politicians but not affect interactions of groups that determine political outcomes 2. Not only possible model and not always perfect, but good 3. Focus on the requirements for a stable democracy and the choice of new democratic institutions during transitions 4. Przeworski begins with observation that democracy survives when groups that lose out in the policy process continue to comply with the democratic rules of the game. Focus turns towards losers and what forces them to stop playing by the rules. Losers' compliance depends on 1) stakes of the game, 2) probability of winning in the future, 3) discount rate: factors all affected by institutions of democracy as well as probability of successful subversion. 5. Now clear that institutions affect democratic consolidation, focus turns towards how different institutions affect losers' calculations and how political actors choose new institutions during transitions to democracy. 6. For Przeworski, institutions emerge as the result of bargaining between political forces. Where the relation of forces is known and uneven, institutions reflect the interests of a particular person, party or alliance. Where the relation of forces is unknown, institutions can be expected that have checks and balances, reduce the stakes of competition, and provide guarantees to potential minorities. Anarchic and uncertain transitional situation, therefore, may be most conducive to democracy.

Advantages of comparison

1. Supplies meaningful contrast, without which no explanation possible 2. Versus single-case history, promotes reflection on role of external circumstances, not just role of individuals 3. Encourages formulation in generalisable terms, allowing for knowledge accumulation 4. May allow for testing of intermediate steps in argument 5. May allow distinguishing crucial elements within a complex of related features

Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture"

1. The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. 2. The point for now is only that ethnography s thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection-is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households . . . writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of') a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. 3. So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms. But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.

Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts"

1. The emergence of democracy is not a by-product of economic development. Democracy is or is not established by political actors pursuing their goals, and it can be initiated at any level of development. Only once it is established do economic constraints play a role: the chances for the survival of democracy are greater when the country is richer. Yet even the current wealth of a country is not decisive: democracy is more likely to survive in a growing economy with less than $1,000 per capita income than in a country with an income between $1,000 and $2,000 that declines economically. If they succeed in generating development, democracy can survive even in the poorest nations. 2. The facts we report concern 135 countries between roughly 1950 and 1990. "Entry" year refers to 1950, or to the year when a country became independent, or to the first year for which economic data are available, and "exit" year refers to 1990 or to the last year when the data are available. All the regimes that occurred during this period were classified as democracies or dictatorships (we use the latter term interchangeably with "authoritarian regimes"). Altogether, we observed 224 regimes, 101 democratic and 123 authoritarian. The references to levels of development and growth rates are expressed in constant U.S. dollars computed at purchasing power parities and expressed in 1985 prices. (Thus all $ numbers refer to 1985 PPP USD.) The lowest level we observed in the entire sample is $226 (Burma in 1950), the highest is $18,095 (United States in 1989)

Motive force

1. The engine that pushes history forward. 2. This was the aspiration of earlier CP scholars, who wanted to explain the development of the world. 3. Developmental scholars wanted to point to patterns in history. 4. This is very different from last week, when scholars were explaining particular outcomes in particular places.

Method of agreement

1. The method of agreement is by far the simplest and the most straightforward of Mill's methods, but it is also generally regarded as an inferior technique that is likely to lead to faulty empirical generalizations. Simply stated, the method of agreement argues that if two or more instances of a phenomenon under investigation have only one of several possible causal circumstances in common, then the circumstance in which all the instances agree is the cause of the phenomenon of interest. 2. cases with the same outcome, but as many differences as possible 3. Note that variables can interact with one another

Kanchan Chandra, "Civic Life or Economic Interdependence?"

1. The most important contribution of the Varshney book in my view, however, is not the argument about inter-ethnic civic engagement. Rather, it is the more precise and more powerful proposition linking high levels of inter-ethnic economic interdependence with low levels of violence that lies wrapped within the broader argument. The logic underlying this proposition, phrased in my words, but consistent with Varshney's data, might run as follows: wherever Hindus and Muslims are dependent upon each other in the local economy, local Hindu and Muslim economic actors will co-operate to prevent violence in order not to incur economic losses on both sides. In such towns, if political entrepreneurs choose to play a polarising strategy, Hindus and Muslims tied to each other in the local economy will resist. Over time, faced with resistance from these interdependent economic actors, political elites should switch to moderate strategies. Consequently, these towns should have a low probability of riots. In those towns where Hindus and Muslims are not economically interdependent, there is no local check on the polarising strategies of political entrepreneurs. When they play a polarising strategy, these towns are likely to flare up immediately. Consequently, towns without economic interdependence should have a high probability of riots. 2. all the peaceful cases differ from all the violent cases in the existence of interdependence within industry, with the exception of Calicut, where the economy is driven by trade rather than industry. Further, all peaceful towns differ from all violent towns in inter-communal membership in trade and business associations, except Lucknow for which data is not available. 3. The proposition that economic interdependence is the key variable explaining ethnic peace is largely consistent, furthermore, with the data on the background of those individuals who intervene to preserve the peace. Wherever such data are presented, we find that the agents of peace are most often those who have an economic stake in preventing violence. In Surat in the 1920s, it was Muslim businessmen, locked together in business ties with Hindus, who resisted attempts at polarisation from above.

causal mechanism

1. The processes or pathways through which an outcome is brought into being. 2. For LWL re Iran: regime change -> strong, cohesive military apparatus -> no regime change

Barbara Geddes, "How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics"

1. This article demonstrates how the selection of cases for study on the basis of outcomes on the dependent variable biases conclusions. 2. When one sets out to explain why countries A and B have, say, developed more rapidly than countries C through G, one is implicitly looking for some antecedent factors X through Z that countries A and B possess, but that countries C through G do not. The crux of the difficulty that arises when cases are selected on the dependent variable is that if one studies only countries A and B, one can collect only half the information needed, namely what A and B have in common. Unless one also studies countries C through G (or a sample of them) to make sure they lack factors X through Z, one cannot know whether or not the factors identified are crucial antecedents of the outcome under investigation. Countries A and B may be the only countries that have X through Z, in which case the hypothesis seems plausible. But many other countries may also have them, in which case the hypothesis would seem dubious. 3. NOTE: Such an inference cannot be justified because the selection of cases by virtue of their location in East Asia biases the sample just as surely as selection explicitly based on growth rates. This is so because, on average, growth rates in East Asia are unusually high. 4. Whichever interpretation is correct, the point here is not to demonstrate that the hypothesis that labor repression contributes to growth is false. This simple bivariate test cannot disconfirm the hypothesis. It may be that the addition of appropriate control variables would make clear a relationship that does not show in the bivariate test. This test does show, however, that the simple relationship that seems to exist when the analyst examines only the most rapidly growing countries disappears when a more representative sample is examined. If analysts who try to explain the success of the new industrializing countries had examined a more representative sample, they would probably have reached different conclusions about the relationship between the repression of labor and growth. As figure 5 shows, labor is just as frequently repressed in slow-growing Third World countries as in fast. 5. Theda Skocpol's stimulating and thoughtful book States and Social Revolutions (1979) combines selection on the dependent variable with a complex, path-dependent argument. She wants to explain why revolutions occur, so she picks the three most well-known instances—the French, Russian, and Chinese—to examine. She also examines a few cases in which revolution failed to occur as contrasting cases at strategic points in her chain of argument. The use of cases selected from both ends of the dependent variable makes this a more sophisticated design than the studies of the NICs. 6. The central argument in States and Social Revolutions is schematized in figure 7. Skocpol's argument is that external military threats will cause state officials to initiate reforms opposed by the dominant class. If the dominant class has an independent economic base and a share of political power, its opposition will be effective and will cause a split in the elite. If, in addition, peasant villages are solidary and autonomous from day-to-day landlord super-vision, peasants will take advantage of the elite split and rebel, which will lead to revolution. This explanation, according to Skocpol, mirrors the historical record in France and in the parts of China controlled by the Communists. The Russian case differs from the other two in that the upper class lacked the independent economic base necessary to impede state-sponsored reforms, and, consequently, the elite remained unified and revolution failed to occur after the Crimean War. Nevertheless, defeat in World War I caused elite disintegration that opened the way for revolution in 1917. 7. As it happens, several Spanish-American countries (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay) have the structural characteristics she identifies and so can be used as a set of cases on which to test the hypothesis linking military threat to revolution. These cases are obviously not selected at random, but, since their geographical location is not correlated with revolution, geography does not serve as a proxy for the dependent variable (as occurred in the test of the relationship between labor repression and growth among the East Asian NICs). In the following test, I have used a higher level of threat than that experienced by France in the late eighteenth century. I wanted to choose a criterion for assessing threat that would eliminate arguments about whether a country was "really" threatened enough, and I found it hard to establish an unambiguous criterion that corresponded to the "France threshold." Consequently, the criterion used here is loss of a war, accompanied by invasion and/or loss of territory to the opponent. With such a high threat threshold, finding cases of revolution in the absence of threat will not disconfirm Skocpol's argument since the countries may have experienced external pressures sufficient to meet her criteria even though they have not lost wars. If several countries have lost wars (and the structural conditions identified as necessary by Skocpol are present) but have not had revolutions, however, this test will cast doubt on her argument. Figure 10 shows seven instances of extreme military threat that failed to lead to revolution, two revolutions not preceded by any unusual degree of external competition or threat, and one revolution, the Bolivian, that fits Skocpol's argument. These findings suggest that if Skocpol had selected a broader range of cases to examine, rather than selecting three cases because of their placement on the dependent variable, she would have come to different conclusions

Michael L. Ross, "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?"

1. This article has four main findings. First, the oil-impedes-democracy claim is both valid and statistically robust: oil does hurt democracy. 2. Second, the harmful influence of oil is not restricted to the Middle East. 3. The third finding is that nonfuel mineral wealth also impedes democratization. 4. The fourth finding is that there is at least tentative support for three causal mechanisms that link oil and authoritarianism: a rentier effect, through which governments use low tax rates and high spending to dampen pressures for democracy; a repression effect, by which governments build up their internal security forces to ward off democratic pressures; and a modernization effect, in which the failure of the population to move into industrial and service sector jobs renders them less likely to push for democracy. 5. Vindicates modernatization theory 6. Data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997: did not treat each country itself as a data point. He expanded the relevant universe to over 2,000 observations by classifying a given country in a given year as a data point

Daniel Posner, "The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi"

1. This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. 2. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. 3. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. 4. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-a-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. 5. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. 6. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation"

1. Though both journalists and the academic literature on ethnic conflict give the opposite impression, a peaceful and even cooperative relations between ethnic groups are far more common than is large-scale violence. 2. We seek to explain this norm of interethnic peace and how it occasionally breaks down, arguing that formal and informal institutions usually work to contain or "cauterize" disputes between individual members of different groups. Using a social matching game model, we show that local-level interethnic cooperation can be supported in essentially two ways. 3. In spiral equilibria, disputes between individuals are correctly expected to spiral rapidly beyond the two parties, and fear of this induces cooperation "on the equilibrium path. " 4. In in-group policing equilibria, individuals ignore transgressions by members of the other group, correctly expecting that the culprits will be identified and sanctioned by their own ethnic brethren. A range of examples suggests that both equilibria occur empirically and have properties expected from the theoretical analysis. 5. One way peace between two ethnic groups can be preserved is if each group punishes its own members for bad behavior toward the other group. Such "ingroup policing" is effective, they suggest, because people usually have better intelligence about the doings of members of their own ethnic group. Thus, members of an ethnic group are in a position to reliably punish just those of their co-ethnics who have behaved badly in inter-ethnic interactions. By contrast, to the extent that people have a hard time identifying poorly behaved individuals who are not members of their ethnic group, they will only be capable of indiscriminate punishment of all the transgressors' co-ethnics. Such punishment may also deter bad behavior, but is more likely to lead to a spiral of violence. Fearon and Laitin capture these two possibilities in the form of two distinct equilibrium strategies in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game involving both intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic interactions.

John Gerring, "Internal Validity: Process Tracing"

1. To reiterate, our query regarding the validity of process tracing research has two very general answers: (1) clarify the argument, with all its attendant twists and turns (preferably with the aid of a visual diagram or formal model) and (2) verify each stage of this model, along with an estimate of relative uncertainty (for each stage and for the model as a whole). Simple though it sounds, these two desiderata (and particularly the latter) are not always easy to accomplish. Process tracing evidence is, almost by definition, difficult to verify, for it extends to evidence that is nonexperimental and cannot be analyzed in a sample-based format (by virtue of the incommensurability of individual bits of evidence). 2. Fortunately, there are several mitigating features of process tracing that may give us greater confidence in results that are based, at least in part, on this unorthodox style of evidence. First, process tracing is often employed as an adjunct form of analysis - a complement to a formal research design (experimental or observational). Indeed, one way to think about process tracing is as a cross-check, a triangulation, that can be - and ought to be - applied to all results gained through formal methods. 3. Second, process tracing rests upon contextual assumptions and assumptions about how the world works. Insofar as there is a comfortable fit between the evidence and the assumptions of a process tracing account, that account should pass muster. 4. In sum, despite its apparently mysterious qualities, process tracing has an important role to play in case-based social science. Whether it is employed in an adjunct capacity or whether the author's conclusions rest primarily on the analysis of noncomparable observations, it deserves an honored place in the tool kit of social science.

Gabriel A. Almond and Stephen J. Genco, "Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics"

1. Two analogies summarize the core of this debate. 2. One is that politics is amorphous, like the shifting formlessness of clouds; the other is that it is based on precise, mechanical causation, like a watch. 3. After careful analysis, Almond and Genco concluded that the quandary in political science can, to a large extent, be explained by the fact that, by themselves, clock-model assumptions are inappropriate for dealing with the substance of political phenomena." 4. Their conclusion comes from the belief that all theories must necessarily include transient and fleeting phenomena. 5. Politics is not totally predictable, Almond and Genco maintain, because human behavior is involved - political reality "has distinctive properties which make it unamenable to forms of explanation used in the natural sciences." 6. Therefore, the science of politics should not be seen as a set of methods with a predetermined theory but instead as "a commitment to explore and attempt to understand a given segment of empirical reality."

Marx's developmental history

1. Unit: nation-states 2. Trajectory: feudalism to capitalism to socialism 3. Motive force: class struggle

David Collier, James Mahoney, Jason Seawright, "Claiming too much: warnings about Selection Bias"

1. Warnings about selection bias are mistaken, because quantitative and qualitative research have different sources of inferential leverage 2. Selection bias is not always a problem in qualitative research 3. In research that involves truncation, within-case analysis can lead to overgeneralized idiosyncratic findings, which score high on dependent variable but low on the independent variable 4. Qualitative researchers can do better by looking at high scores on both independent and dependent variables

Nancy Cartwright, "Knowing What We Are Talking About: Why Evidence Doesn't Always Travel"

1. When is a well-established study result that a given policy/programme/treatment produced a given outcome in a particular study setting ('there') evidence that that policy/programme/treatment will produce that outcome in a new setting ('here')? 2. This paper insists that 'there' and 'here' be firmly distinguished and offers in answer that we must have evidence that two further facts obtain: (a) that the policy can play the same causal role widely (widely enough to cover both here and there) and (b) that a complete set of the support factors necessary for the policy to operate here are present in some individuals here.

2. Comparative politics asks questions about political 'outcomes' within nation-states

1. Why are Chewas and Tumbukas allies in Zambia and adversaries in Malawi? 2. Why did Iran's rulers successfully repress mass protests in 2009 when Egypt's in 2011 did not? 3. Why did the French revolution happen? 4. Does mineral wealth undermine democracy, and if so, why? 5. Why are rich countries democratic? I.e. comparative politics scholars value comparative significance

Daniel Ziblatt, "Of Course Generalize, but How? Returning to Middle-Range Theory in Comparative Politics"

1. Ziblatt writes about universal generalizations in prospective and hypothetical terms, as worthy aspirations but not accomplished facts. 2. He mounts an erudite defense of middle-range theory as the best path to universals. 3. More systematically, middle-range theory is marked by three core attributes. 4. First, middle-range theories have a delimited substantive focus. Their purpose is not to create a theory of politics in general, but rather a theory, for example, of welfare state formation, state-building, or democratic reversals. 5. Second, middle-range theorists self-consciously reflect upon and specify what is often called the "scope conditions" of a theory. Classic works in the field also gain a great deal of their analytical power by having a relatively narrow scope. For example, Theda Skocpol's still classic States and Social Revolutions not only provides a theory of revolution, but establishes at its outset that it is intended to apply in contexts of politically ambitious agrarian states that did not experience colonialism. To test the validity of the argument, one needs to find cases that fit this standard (THE LATIN AMERICAN TEST WOULD FAIL THIS STANDARD) 3. The third attribute of middle-range theory is careful and systematic conceptualization: compare right things, but don't say comparison is impossible.

Method of difference

1. a method of scientific induction devised by J. S. Mill according to which if an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs and an instance in which it does not occur have each circumstance except one in common, that one occurring only in the former, the circumstance in which the two instances differ is the effect or cause or necessary part of the cause of the phenomenon 2. cases as similar as possible, but one outcome is different and so isolate the one cause

Karl Marx 1840s-1883

1. feudalism to capitalism to socialism 2. Marx is famous for having a theory of the way history unfolds 3. For Marx, history is driven by class struggle, and class struggle is driven by technical change.

Max Weber 1890s-1920

1. rationalisation, bureaucratisation 2. Weber was very bourgeois, Marx was not. Weber grew up in a well-off family and trained as a lawyer. Weber is attractive, because he focused on causal mechanisms, why things unfold the way they do. Whereas Marx saw one natural progression, Weber grasped the complexity and contingency inherent in history.

Why not give up comparative politics and become historians of individual cases? (2)

Couldn't one just process-trace in the individual case and leave it at that?

David Laitin, "Ethnography and/or Rational Choice: A Response from David Laitin"

Despite my differences with the panelists in regard to the details discussed herein, I think the larger issue raised here- how to harness ethnographic data in a positivist research program that helps us understand such things as the relationship of cultural heterogeneity to democracy, to economic growth, and to social order, and not whether Laitin has been consistent across thirty years of writing-is what should most concern us as political scientists.

Similarities and differences between the cases

Preconditions 1. Reagent 1: white powder 2. Reagent 2: vinegar 3. Bowl: for 1, red design; for 2, blue design 4. Pitcher:: for 1, red lettering; for 2, blue lettering 5. Spoon: for 1, metal; for 2, plastic Outcomes Outcome: for 1, powder floats; for 2, powder foams

So, let's define comparative politics:

It's a subdiscipline of political science that: 1. Asks causal questions 2. about political outcomes within nation-states 3. seeking answers of comparative significance 4. and engages in unending controversies about scientific standards!

But surely, we know how to do science?

JS Mill: Establish causes by comparison 1. Method of agreement: same precondition, same outcome ➔ the precondition is the cause 2. Method of difference: when precondition absent, outcome is absent ➔ the precondition is the cause 3. I.e. method of difference seems more plausible. Week 1 readings implicitly rely on the method of difference. MoD says you have 2 different outcomes, precondition can't be the cause.

Why not give up comparative politics and become historians of individual cases? (1)

Lachapelle, Jean, Lucan A. Way, and Steven Levitsky. 2012. "Crisis, Coercion, and Authoritarian Durability: Explaining Diverging Responses to Anti-Regime Protest in Egypt and Iran." shows us why

John Stuart Mill, "A system of logic, ratiocinative and inductive: being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation"

Lays out the method of difference and the method of agreement

Week 2 (slides)

The Developmental Tradition and Small-N Comparisons