Review article: The mechanismic worldview: Thinking inside the box

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 161-179

  Gerring, John ^a  

^a Boston University   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36948999040     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000082     Document Type: Review

References (177)

1. Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Barry Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 12-13.
2. For recent reviews, see Henry E. Brady, 'Models of Causal Inference: Going Beyond the Neyman-Rubin-Holland Theory' (paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Political Methodology Group, Seattle, 2002);
3. John Gerring, 'Causation: A Unified Framework for the Social Sciences', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 17 (2005), 163-98;
4. Paul W. Holland, 'Statistics and Causal Inference', Journal of the American Statistical Association, 81 (1986), 945-60;
5. Margaret Marini and Burton Singer, 'Causality in the Social Sciences', in Clifford Clogg, ed., Sociological Methodology, 18 (American Sociological Association, 1988), pp. 347-409;
6. Vaughn R. McKim and Stephen P. Turner, eds, Causality in Crisis ? Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1997);
7. Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2000) ;
8. Fritz K. Ringer, 'Causal Analysis in Historical Reasoning', History and Theory, 28 (1989), 154-72;
9. Michael E. Sobel, 'Causal Inference in the Social and Behavioral Sciences', in Gerhard Arminger, Clifford C. Clogg and Michael E. Sobel, eds, Handbook of Statistical Modeling for the Social and Behavioral Sciences (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), pp. 1-38;
10. William R. Thompson, 'A Streetcar Named Sarajevo: Catalysts, Multiple Causation Chains, and Rivalry Structures', International Studies Quarterly, 47 (2003), 453-74;
11. David Waldner, 'Anti Anti-Determinism.: Or What Happens When Schrodinger's Cat and Lorenz's Butterfly Meet Laplace's Demon in the Study of Political and Economic Development' (paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 2002);
12. Alexander Wendt, 'On Constitution and Causation in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), 101-17;
13. Christopher Winship and Michael Sobel, 'Causal Inference in Sociological Studies', in Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman, eds, Handbook of Data Analysis (London: Sage, 2004), pp. 481-503.
14. See Peter Abell, 'Narrative Explanation: An Alternative to Variable-Centered Explanation?' Annual Review of Sociology, 30 (2004), 287-310;
15. Christopher H. Achen, 'Toward a New Political Methodology: Microfoundations and ART', Annual Review of Political Science, 5 (2002), 423-50;
16. Andrew Bennett, 'Beyond Hempel and Back to Hume: Causal Mechanisms and Causal Explanation' (paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2003);
17. Mario Bunge, 'Mechanism, and Explanation', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 27 (1997), 410-65;
18. Ruth Berins Collier and Sebastian Mazzuca, 'Does History Repeat?' in Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 472-89;
19. Tyler Cowen, 'Do Economists Use Social Mechanisms to Explain?' in Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 125-46;
20. David Dessler, 'Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War', International Studies Quarterly, 35 (1991), 337-55;
21. Jon Elster, 'A Plea for Mechanisms', in Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 45-73;
22. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005);
23. Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms: An Introductory Essay', in Peter Hedstrom. and Richard Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1-31;
24. James Johnson, 'Consequences of Positivism: A Pragmatist Assessment', Comparative Political Studies, 39 (2006), 224-52;
25. Shira Lewin, 'Economics and Psychology: Lessons for Our Own Day from the Early Twentieth Century', Journal of Economic Literature, 34 (1996), 1293-1323;
26. James Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method', Sociological Forum, 16 (2001), 575-93;
27. Renate Mayntz, 'Mechanisms in the Analysis of Social Macro-Phenomena', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34 (2004), 237-54;
28. Roger Petersen, 'Mechanisms and Structures in Comparisons', in John R. Bowen and Roger Petersen, eds, Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61-77;
29. Andreas Pickel, The Problem of Order in the Global Age: Systems and Mechanisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
30. Wesley C. Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984);
31. Daniel Steel, 'Social Mechanisms and Causal Inference', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34 (2003), 55-78;
32. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, 'The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing about Mechanisms in Social Science', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 21 (1991), 367-88;
33. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, The Logic of Social Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
34. Charles Tilly, 'Mechanisms in Political Processes', Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), 21-4.1;
35. Waldner, 'Anti Anti-Determinism'. For discussions of mechanism, in the context of the natural science and philosophy of science, see Stuart S. Glennan, 'Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation', Erkenntnis, 44 (1996), 49-71;
36. Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver, 'Thinking about Mechanisms', Philosophy of Science, 67 (2000), 1-25;
37. James G. Tabery, 'Synthesizing Activities and Interactions in the Concept of a Mechanism.', Philosophy of Science, 71 (2004), 1-15.
38. Mario Bunge, Causality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 33.
39. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (New York: Random House, 2006).
40. Peter A. Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1981), p. 166.
41. A minimal definition must be substitutable for all extant usages of a term within a particular language region. See John Gerring and Paul A. Barresi, 'Putting Ordinary Language to Work: A Min-Max Strategy of Concept Formation in the Social Sciences', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15 (2003), 201-32;
42. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 61.
43. Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 167.
44. E.g., Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, 'Studies in the Logic of Explanation', Philosophy of Science, 15 (1948), 135-75.
45. For Hume, this covariational relationship was assumed to be deterministic; later philosophers have usually assumed it to be probabilistic. For our purposes, the issue is extraneous. Although there are other ways of viewing the complex topic of causation (Brady, 'Models of Causal Inference'), the contrast between the generative and covariational components of causation is central to the development of a mechanism-centred view of social science. Thus, I leave other matters in abeyance.
46. Bunge, 'Mechanism and Explanation'; Rom Harre, The Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
47. Daniel Little, 'Causal Explanation in the Social Sciences', Southern Journal of Philosophy, 34 (Supplement, 1995), 31-56;
48. Daniel Little, Microfoundations, Method, and Causation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998);
49. Peter Manicas, A Realist Philosophy of Science: Explanation and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
50. Milton Friedman, 'The Methodology of Positive Economies', in Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 3-43.
51. Gary Gutting, ed., Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980);
52. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1962] 1970);
53. Margaret Masterman, 'The Nature of a Paradigm', in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 59-89.
54. John Gerring, 'Interpretations of Interpretivism', Qualitative Methods: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Qualitative Methods, 1:2 (Fall 2003), 2-6.
55. Gerring and Barresi, 'Putting Ordinary Language to Work'; James Johnson, 'How Conceptual Problems Migrate: Rational Choice, Interpretation, and the Hazards of Pluralism', Annual Review of Political Science, 5 (2002), 223-48;
56. James Johnson, 'Conceptual Problems as Obstacles to Theoretical Progress in Political Science: Political Culture among the "Sociologists" ', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15 (2003), 87-115.
57. Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, 'Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms', Political Studies, 44 (1996), 936-57.
58. Richard Boyd, 'The Current Status of Scientific Realism.', in Jarrett Leplin, ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 41-82.
59. Jennifer Platt, 'The Social Construction of "Positivism" and its Significance in British Sociology 1950-1980', in Philip Abrams, Rosemary Deem, Janet Finch and Paul Rocket, eds, Practice and Progress: British Sociology 1950-1980 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp. 73-87.
60. Giovanni Sartori, 'The Tower of Babble', in Giovanni Sartori, Fred W. Riggs and Henry Teune, eds, Tower of Babel: On the Definition and Analysis of Concepts in the Social Sciences (Pittsburgh: International Studies Association, 1975), pp. 7-38.
61. Note that while the style of discussion in this article is 'analytic', its focus is only peripherally on basic issues of philosophy of science and I reference work in this genre only where directly relevant to current practices in the social sciences. For earlier efforts of this nature, see Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis', pp. 579-80;
62. Mayntz, 'Mechanisms in the Analysis of Social Macro-Phenomena', pp. 237-54.
63. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 15;
64. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, p. 143;
65. Hedstrom and Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms', pp. 13-15;
66. Johnson, 'Consequences of Positivism', p. 247;
67. Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis'; James Mahoney, 'Revisiting General Theory in Historical Sociology', Social Forces, 83 (2004), 459-89;
68. Herbert Alexander Simon, 'The Meaning of Causal Ordering', in Robert K. Mertin, James S. Coleman and P. H. Rossi, eds, Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 65-81 at p. 7.1.
69. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (London: Vintage, 1993).
70. Andrew Bennett, 'Beyond Hempel and Back to Hume: Causal Mechanisms and Causal Explanation' (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2003), app. p. 15.
71. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development; p. 143,
72. quoted in Bernhard Kittel, 'On the Observability of Causal Mechanisms in Macro-Level Research', Concepts and Methods, 2:2 (Summer 2006), 15-16, p. 15. Of course, these passages may refer to the general unobservability of all social phenomena, as noted above, in which case they are no more applicable to mechanisms than to covariations.
73. Bunge, 'Mechanism and Explanation', p. 421.
74. Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis', p. 581.
75. James Mahoney, 'Tentative Answers to Questions about Causal Mechanisms' (paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2003), p. 5.
76. Mahoney, 'Tentative Answers to Questions about Causal Mechanisms', p. 5.
77. Stinchcombe, 'The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing about Mechanisms in Social Science', p. 367. Emphasis in original.
78. Bennett, 'Beyond Hempel and Back to Hume', app. p. 16. Emphasis added.
79. Kittel, 'On the Observability of Causal Mechanisms in Macro-Level Research', pp. 15-16.
80. Mahoney, 'Tentative Answers to Questions about Causal Mechanisms', pp. 6-7.
81. Milton Friedman, 'The Methodology of Positive Economics'.
82. Hedstrom and Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms', pp. 1-31, at p. 15.
83. E.g., George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development.
84. Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 522-36, chap. 18, esp. p. 534.
85. Colin Elman, 'Explanatory Typologies in Qualitative Studies of International Polities', International Organization, 59 (2005), 293-326.
86. Raymond Boudon, 'Social Mechanisms without Black Boxes', in Hedstrom and Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms, pp. 172-203, at p. 172.
87. Stinchcombe, The Logic of Social Research, p. 17. Emphasis in original.
88. Cowen, 'Do Economists Use Social Mechanisms to Explain?', p. 128;
89. Glennan, 'Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation', p. 68;
90. Mahoney, 'Tentative Answers to Questions about Causal Mechanisms'.
91. Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
92. Achen, 'Toward a New Political Methodology'.
93. Hedstrom and Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms'; Mahoney, 'Tentative Answers to Questions about Causal Mechanisms'.
94. Elster, 'A Plea for Mechanisms', p. 45.
95. Stuart S. Glennan, 'Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation' (unpublished, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Butler University, 2000), p. 1.
96. Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.
97. Hempel and Oppenheim, 'Studies in the Logic of Explanation'.
98. E.g., Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences.
99. Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1991), p. 15.
100. Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis', p. 580.
101. Gudmund Gambetta, 'Concatenations of Mechanisms', in Hedstrom and Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms, pp. 102-24, at p. 102.
102. Elster, 'A Plea for Mechanisms', p. 45.
103. Thomas Cook and Donald Campbell, Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 33.
104. Waldner, 'Anti Anti-Determinism'.
105. Waldner, 'Anti Anti-Determinism', p. 90.
106. Gary Goertz and Harvey Starr, eds, Necessary Conditions: Theory, Methodology and Applications (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
107. Glennan, 'Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation'.
108. Hedstrom. and Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms', p. 17;
109. Stinchcombe, 'The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing about Mechanisms in Social Science' ; Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman, 'Complex Causal Relations and Case Study Methods: The Example of Path Dependence', Political Analysis, 14 (2006), 250-67.
110. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development;
111. Henry E. Brady, 'Data-Set Observations versus Causal-Process Observations: The 2000 U.S. Presidential Election', in Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 267-72;
112. Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
113. John H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology: Numbers, Narratives, and the Integration of Research and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 149.
114. Aage B. Sorensen, 'Theoretical Mechanisms and the Empirical Study of Social Processes', in Hedstrom and Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms, pp. 238-66.
115. Readers will recognize an amalgamation of arguments vetted by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, 'Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation', American Economic Review, 91 (2001), 1369-401;
116. Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Stanley L. Engerman, 'Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14 (2000), 217-32.
117. David R. Cameron, "The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis', American Political Science Review, 72 (1978), 1243-61.
118. Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, ' Why Doesn' t the US Have a European-Style Welfare State?' Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2 (2001), 187-277.
119. For additional examples of this nature, see Yi Feng, Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003);
120. Elissaios Papyrakis and Reyer Gerlagh, 'The Resource Curse Hypothesis and its Transmission Channels', Journal of Comparative Economics, 32 (2003), 181-93;
121. Michael Ross, 'Does Oil Hinder Democracy?' World Politics, 53 (2001), 325-61.
122. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development;
123. Peter A. Hall, 'Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Polities', in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 373-404.
124. Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
125. Andrew Abbott and Angela Tsay, 'Sequence Analysis and Optimal Matching Methods in Sociology', Sociological Methods and Research, 29 (2000), 3-33;
126. Lawrence L. Wu, 'Some Comments on "Sequence Analysis and Optimal Matching Methods in Sociology: Review and Prospect" ', Sociological Methods and Research, 29 (2000), 41-64.
127. James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner and Jeremy M. Weinstein, 'Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision? An Experimental Approach' (unpublished, Georgetown University: Institute for the Study of Labor, 2006).
128. Macartan Humphreys, 'Natural Resources, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution: Uncovering the Mechanisms', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49 (2005), 508-37;
129. Ross, 'Does Oil Hinder Democracy?'
130. The very fact of being labelled a causal mechanism may imply that there is something methodologically recalcitrant about the question at hand.
131. John Gerring, 'What is a Case Study and What is it Good For?', American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), 341-54.
132. George Steinmetz, 'Critical Realism and Historical Sociology', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40 (1998), 170-86, pp. 177-8.
133. David K. Lewis, Countetfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973);
134. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
135. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development.
136. John Gerring, Philip Bond, William Barndt and Carola Moreno, 'Democracy and Growth: A Historical Perspective', World Politics, 57 (2005), 323-64.
137. Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter, 'The Role of General Theory in Comparative-Historical Sociology', American Journal of Sociology, 97 (1991), 1-30, p. 5. Emphasis added.
138. David Waldner, 'Transforming Inferences into Explanations: Lessons from the Study of Mass Extinctions', in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach, eds, Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 145-75.
139. Gerring, 'Causation'.
140. Hedstrom and Swedberg, 'Social Mechanisms', p. 25.
141. Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences.
142. E.g., Meyer Fortes and Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940);
143. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, [1922] 1984);
144. Jean Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
145. Cyril Edwin Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966);
146. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951).
147. E.g., Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);
148. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
149. E.g., Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
150. E.g., Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968);
151. Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press, 1966);
152. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
153. E.g., Marie-Esprit-Leon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954).
154. E.g., Phillips Cutright, 'Political Structure, Economic Development and National Social Security Programs', American Journal of Sociology, 70 (1965), 439-55 ;
155. Bruce M. Russett, J. David Singer and Melvin Small, 'National Political Units in the Twentieth Century: A Standardized List', American Political Science Review, 62 (1968), 932-51.
156. Richard Snyder, 'Scaling Down: The Subnational Comparative Method', Studies in Comparative International Development, 36 (2001), 93-110.
157. Raymond Boudon, 'What Middle-Range Theories Are', Contemporary Sociology, 20 (1991), 519-52;
158. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, [1949] 1968).
159. Robert A. Dahl, 'The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest', American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 763-72.
160. Gambetta, 'Concatenations of Mechanisms', p. 102. Emphasis in original.
161. See also Thomas Schelling, 'Social Mechanisms and Social Dynamics', in Hedstrom and Swedberg, eds, Social Mechanisms, pp. 32-44, at pp. 32-3.
162. Kevin D. Hoover, Causality in Macroeconomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
163. Kevin D. Hoover, The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
164. Tilly, 'Mechanisms in Political Processes';
165. Waldner, 'Anti Anti-Determinism.'. See discussion in Johnson, 'Consequences of Positivism', p. 247.
166. For example, some scholars identify the study of causal mechanisms with a narrative account of social action (this is perhaps the more usual position), while others presume the construction of formal mathematical models (e.g., Cowen, 'Do Economists Use Social Mechanisms to Explain?';
167. Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978);
168. Schelling, 'Social Mechanisms and Social Dynamics';
169. Sorensen, 'Theoretical Mechanisms and the Empirical Study of Social Processes').
170. Kittel, 'On the Observability of Causal Mechanisms in Macro-Level Research', points out that while the normal usage of causal mechanism is quite distinct from the manipulation theory of causation (based on formal experiments), George and Bennett occasionally veer towards the latter: 'If we were able to measure changes in the entity being acted upon after the intervention of the causal mechanism and in temporal and spatial isolation from other mechanisms, then the causal mechanism may be said to have generated the observed change in this entity' (George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, p. 137).
171. This usage is virtually indistinguishable from Holland, 'Statistics and Causal Inference', or for that matter from Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 76-9, as noted by Kittel, 'On the Observability of Causal Mechanisms in Macro-Level Research'.
172. Stinchcombe, 'The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing about Mechanisms in Social Science', p. 367. Emphasis in original.
173. A long list of definitions is provided in Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis', pp. 579-80.
174. Otherwise, all scientific progress must be achieved through new terms, a process that is sometimes more confusing than the redefinition of old terms.
175. But see Mahoney, 'Beyond Correlational Analysis', p. 578.
176. I owe this suggestion to Jim. Mahoney (personal communication). See David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr, 'Conceptual "Stretching" Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis', American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 845-55;
177. David Collier and Steven Levitsky, 'Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research', World Politics, 49 (1997), 430-51.