Causal inference and American political development: common challenges and opportunities
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Causal inference and American political development: common challenges and opportunities Eric Schickler1 Received: 4 July 2019 / Accepted: 12 July 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The causal inference (CI) movement has forced political scientists to think far more seriously about what can be learned from a particular research design and to be more attentive to making design choices that allow for credible causal inferences. At the same time, the rise of CI has given rise to the concern that political scientists have been better at making particular contributions isolating the effect of a single independent variable than at developing and testing theories that help us understand how these diverse findings fit together. For all of American political development’s (APD’s) distance from the causal inference revolution, a parallel can be drawn between the state of APD today and some of the concerns expressed about the broader state of political science in the wake of the rise of CI. This essay considers ways in which APD and CI can each be enriched through greater mutual engagement, suggesting that one should not dichotomize research into mutually exclusive categories of “well-identified research that makes credible causal claims” and “purely descriptive” APD studies. Keywords Causal inference · American political development · Historical institutionalism
1 Introduction This collection of essays on causal inference and American political development (APD) comes at an opportune moment. While several contributors have commented on the evident gulf separating the causal inference “revolution” in political science from most work that is associated with American political development, the conference organizers’ call to think seriously about the relationship between causal inference and APD speaks to a broad sense of concern that many American politics scholars have with the state of the field. The causal inference movement has made a crucial contribution in forcing political scientists to think far more seriously about what can be learned from a particular research design and to be more attentive to making design choices that allow for credible causal inferences. At the same time, as described below, the growing emphasis on causal inference has coincided with a turn away from institutional analyses and, arguably, less attention * Eric Schickler [email protected] 1
University of California, Berkeley, USA
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being given to “big questions” and theory-building. As a result, the supply of interesting specific findings outpaces our ability to say what these findings add up to with respect to our broader understanding of important political phenomena. Scholars working in APD are particularly sensitive to those trends, given that subfield’s traditional focus on large, complex, normatively significant questions about historical processes and institutions—questions that typically are not well-suited to a crisply defined design-based
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