American political development and new challenges of causal inference
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American political development and new challenges of causal inference Gregory J. Wawro1 · Ira Katznelson1,2 Received: 22 July 2019 / Accepted: 17 August 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Members of the subfield of American Political Development (APD), like other political scientists, are confronting the identification revolution in the social sciences. They are exploring whether and how evolving standards of causal inference can shape the research the subfield performs. Almost by definition, APD research involves analyzing observational data, where variation in the data is provided by ‘nature’, and thus faces the formidable challenges that follow from the inability of the researcher to manipulate the assignment of units of interest to treatment and control conditions. Fortunately, the very scope of historical analysis can create opportunities to take advantage of natural experiments and exogenous inputs that alter the course of events to produce more convincing causal analyses. Yet, historical investigation presents unique challenges to standard methodological approaches, certainly no less the case when causal identification is prioritized. Understanding and confronting these challenges is essential to taking advantage of inferential opportunities presented by historical data, as our consideration of scholarship on economic development demonstrates. Keywords American political development · Causal inference · Discontinuities · Instrumental variables · Path dependence JEL B41 · C36 · N00
1 Introduction From its inception, American political development (APD) has conceived of itself as a subfield within a subfield, marked as distinct from other American politics literatures by the kinds of questions it asks and the methods it employs (Orren and Skowronek 2002; Mahoney and Thelen 2015). Inherently historical and institutional, APD has drawn from * Gregory J. Wawro [email protected] Ira Katznelson [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, USA
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Department of History, Columbia University, New York, USA
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a broad array of approaches to carve out a unique and important niche within American political studies, while maintaining strong links to the subfields of comparative politics, international relations and political theory. One of APD’s major intellectual contributions has been to inject more social scientific methodology into historical research about American politics through a commitment to theory-driven and empirically rigorous analysis. The major early works in APD primarily were qualitative in their approach. Over time, the subfield has introduced more quantification, at least to the extent that many scholars who identify with the movement have come to rely more heavily on quantitative approaches in their research. A longstanding divide has existed between traditional historians and social scientists who study history, a gulf that has widened even further when it comes to em
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