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.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is the method of choice for the analysis of set relations and has changed considerably and improved over the years.

The idea of most-likely and least-likely cases dates back to Eckstein and was one of the few remaining things in qualitative research there seemed to be no disagreement about because they are considered an asset in causal analysis. In a paper that is advance access, Beach and Pedersen (BP) now argue that process tracing and the analysis of mechanisms does not make sense with most-likely and least-likely cases.

One of the recent big and, in my view, underappreciated innovations in the field of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is Baumgartner’s formulation of the Coincidence Analysis algorithm (CNA). Baumgartner presents it as an alternative to QCA, which I do not find convincing because I do not see QCA married to a specific algorithm.