Jack Goldstone: “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation in the Study of Revolutions”

Jack Goldstone argues that Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) holds a distinct epistemological orientation vis-a-vis large-N , frequentist approaches that has proven to be particularly fertile for the study of revolutions. He begins by sketching this CHA epistemology, focusing on its use of Bayesian analysis, process tracing, and congruence testing. Goldstone then proceeds to show, via a historiography of postwar scholarship on revolutions, how the deployment of CHA has produced an increasingly accurate conceptual understanding of revolutions and an a more sophisticated empirical understanding of the emergence, dynamics, and outcomes of revolutionary episodes. Goldstone concludes with a brief overview of recent trends in the social scientific study of revolutions and by outlining five necessary conditions for the emergence of a revolution that extant CHA scholarship has revealed.