Table Of ContentResearch Design in Political Science
Also by Thomas Gschwend
STRATEGIC VOTING IN MIXED-ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
Also by Frank Schimmelfennig
THE EU, NATO AND THE INTEGRATION OF EUROPE: Rules and Rhetoric
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
(co-editor with Ulrich Sedelmeier)
INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIZATION IN EUROPE: European Organizations,
Political Conditionality, and Democratic Change
(co-author with Stefan Engert and Heiko Knobel)
Research Design in
Political Science
How to Practice What They Preach
Edited by
Thomas Gschwend
Senior Research Fellow
University of Mannheim, Germany
and
Frank Schimmelfennig
Professor of European Politics
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland
palgrave
macmillan
Editorial matter,selection,introduction and conclusion
© Thomas Gschwend and Frank Schimmelfennig 2007
All remaining chapters © respective authors 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-01947-8
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First published in 2007 by
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Contents
List of Tables vii
List of Figures viii
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Contributors xi
1 Introduction: Designing Research in Political
Science – A Dialogue between Theory and Data 1
Thomas Gschwend and Frank Schimmelfennig
Part I Research Problem
2 Increasing the Relevance of Research Questions:
Considerations on Theoretical and Social Relevance
in Political Science 21
Matthias Lehnert, Bernhard Miller and Arndt Wonka
Part II Concepts and Theory
3 Concept Specification in Political Science Research 41
Arndt Wonka
4 Typologies in Social Inquiry 62
Matthias Lehnert
Part III Measurement
5 Making Measures Capture Concepts: Tools for
Securing Correspondence between Theoretical Ideas
and Observations 83
Bernhard Miller
6 Achieving Comparability of Secondary Data 103
Julia Rathke
v
vi Contents
Part IV Case Selection
7 Dealing Effectively with Selection Bias in Large-n Research 127
Janina Thiem
8 Case Selection and Selection Bias in Small-n Research 145
Dirk Leuffen
Part V Control
9 Selecting Independent Variables: Competing
Recommendations for Factor-Centric and
Outcome-Centric Research Designs 163
Ulrich Sieberer
10 Discriminating among Rival Explanations: Some Tools
for Small-n Researchers 183
Andreas Dür
Part VI Theoretical Conclusions
11 Falsification in Theory-Guided Empirical Social
Research: How to Change a Tire while Riding Your Bicycle 203
Dirk De Bie`vre
12 Conclusion: Lessons for the Dialogue between
Theory and Data 216
Thomas Gschwend and Frank Schimmelfennig
References 226
Index 241
List of Tables
1.1 Research design tasks and problems 7
1.2 Typology of research designs 14
4.1 Aristotle’s typology of political systems 65
4.2 Different perspectives on institutional effects 72
4.3 A typology of democracies 77
4.4 Two typologies of democracies compared 77
6.1 Table for a compilation of the interesting
variables in the different datasets 114
6.2 Common indicators: internal consistency 119
6.3 Common indicators: external consistency –
membership in organizations and education 120
6.4 Non-common indicators: internal consistency 121
6.5 Non-common indicators: external consistency –
membership in organizations and education 122
7.1 Types of selection problems 131
12.1 Research design and concept specification 218
12.2 Research design and measurement 219
12.3 Research design and case selection 220
12.4 Research design and control 221
12.5 Research design and theoretical conclusions 223
vii
List of Figures
2.1 Types of examples of relevant research questions 32
3.1 Concepts and concept specification in the broader
research design context 43
5.1 The measurement process 85
6.1 Main strategies for assessing conceptual equivalence
in comparative research 107
6.2 Applying the main strategies for establishing
conceptual equivalence 117
7.1 Illustration of practical guidelines 133
9.1 Variables to include in a factor-centric approach 169
9.2 Variables to include in an outcome-centric approach 171
viii
Preface and Acknowledgments
There is no shortage in preaching of how to design research for
political science. Designing Social Inquiry (King, Keohane and Verba,
1994) has strongly contributed to methodological awareness in the
field. It has arguably become the most influential methodological work
in the discipline and a standard item on the reading lists for research
design courses. At the same time, and provoked by its tendency to
model qualitative research on the quantitative, statistical template, it
has triggered extensive controversy and reactions by qualitative schol-
ars. Rethinking Social Inquiry (Brady and Collier, 2004) collects articles
that provide a nuanced response to ‘Designing Social Inquiry’, asserting
the distinctiveness and equivalence of qualitative methodology but,
in the subtitle of the volume, committing themselves to ‘shared
standards’ in spite of ‘diverse tools’.
The debate, however, has generally remained at a highly abstract and
meta-theoretical level. Whereas our advanced students have become
more methodologically aware and willing to improve their research
designs and methods, they have also experienced great difficulties in
translating the abstract considerations and prescriptions in the literature
into concrete advice and guidance for their own research projects.
This gap has become obvious during a series of research design
seminars with PhD students at the Mannheim Center for European
Social Research at the University of Mannheim in the past years and has
eventually triggered our interest in producing this book. As a group of
researchers coming from diverse disciplinary and methodological back-
grounds, we struggled to understand what unites and divides qualitative
and quantitative research, tried to keep abreast of the increasing number
of methodology books and articles, and made an attempt to pay heed to
the advice we received from them in our individual research projects.
We found this experience so gratifying that we decided to share it with
a larger readership. This book is the result of this endeavor.
The volume represents the collective effort of all contributors. We
benefited from several rounds of discussions and revisions among our-
selves. We thank the Mannheim Center for European Social Research for
providing such an intellectually stimulating environment and its and
ETH Zurich’s institutional support in the final preparation of the
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