The Qualitative Foundations of Political Science Methodology

T he last decade has seen a contentious dialogue between quantitative and qualitative scholars over the nature of political science methodology. Even so, there has often been a consensus that quantitative and qualitative research share a “unified logic of inference;” that the differences between these “traditions are only stylistic and are methodologically and substantively unimportant.” All of the books under review here share these convictions. Yet the most remarkable feature of these works taken as a whole —and the focus of this review essay—is the more capacious view of the scientific enterprise on display. John Gerring’s Social Science Methodology, David Collier and Henry Brady’s Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Charles Ragin’s Fuzzy-Set Social Science all focus on aspects of the scientific process beyond the testing of hypotheses—science being “a systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, generalizing, nonsubjective, and cumulative” way of discovering the truth about the world (Gerring, p. xv). If science is the systematic gathering of knowledge, testing hypotheses—the central concern of statistical inference—is an important part of this. But it is only one part. Before we can turn to testing hypotheses, we must be clear about concepts, theories, and cases. And here both Barbara Geddes’s Paradigms and Sand Castles and the Elmans’ Bridges and Boundaries complement the other works by attending closely to these issues even when the larger goal remains the testing of theory. Each of these five books argues that social science methodology (1) requires systematic and continuous concept formation and refinement, (2) employs empirical evidence not only to confirm but also to develop and explore theories, and (3) must come to terms with causal complexity. Taken together, they provide support for a provocative possibility: if social science has a unified logic, it is found in approaches traditionally associated with qualitative methods rather than statistical inference.