Why the filling of gaps in the research literature is similar to replication and probably better than its reputation.

Inspired by an email exchange I had with someone on theoretically non-exclusive hypotheses in Bayesian process tracing, I believed it might be useful to write down some thoughts in a blog post. It ended up as a PDF on Github because it has a minor R element and formal notation.

When making causal (or descriptive) inferences, it is important to think about the context within which the causal relationship is expected to hold because it probably does not hold universally and, possibly, only in a limited setting. Falleti and Lynch have written an excellent article about “context” (I drop the ““ now) in relation with causal mechanisms.

On September 27, the German Science Foundation (DFG) announced its decision to award the status of a research cluster of excellence (Exzellenzcluster) to 57 cluster proposals from all disciplines.

About two weeks ago, COMPASSS issued a Statement on Rejecting Article Submissions because of QCA Solution Type. In short, the reasoning was that methodological work on QCA is developing and that reviewers and editors should not judge empirical work based on whether one particular solution type is interpreted as causal.

The charge that Political Science (or other non-STEM disciplines) is lacking relevance and does not produce interesting research is made then and again, with two new pieces published these days. One is written by a political economist, stating that most research is boring;

Continuing the chapter-by-chapter review of Seawright’s book on Multi-Method Social Science took me longer than I imagined and it should have, but here we go again.

Review of the first chapter of the book “Multi-Method Social Science” by Jason Seawright, published with Cambridge University Press in 2016.

Many APSA 2016 panels and discussions in the Section on Qualitative and Multimethod Research and the Political Methodology Section were centered on the Data Access and Research Transparency (DART) Initiative (probably worth a blog post of its own). Even panels not explicitly dedicated to DART have digressed into this topic, which includes a short exchange between Tasha Fairfield and me in a panel on causal inference in qualitative research.

How to properly interpret consistency and coverage values in fuzzy-set QCA.