Counterfactuals And Hypothesis Testing In Political Science

World Politics

Volumn 43, Issue 2, 1991, Pages 169-195

  Fearon, James D ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84959595354     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: 10863338     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2010470     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 414; Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), 180.
2. “Structural position” here would entail the number of great powers and the basic geopolitical circumstances of the Soviet Union. Waltz (fn. i); and idem, “Another Gap?” in Robert Osgood et al., Containment, Soviet Behavior, and Grand Strategy, Policy Papers in International Affairs No. 16 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1981). On structural versus domestic political or ideological explanations of Soviet foreign policy, see also Barry R. Posen, “Competing Images of the Soviet Union, ” World Politics 39 (July 1987), 579–97.
3. For example, Barrington Moore, The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (London: Macmillan, 1978); Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War, ” International Security 9 (Summer 1984), 58–107. Of course, historians can be quite careful about their counterfactual arguments. For examples, see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988); and George Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), 29—132.
4. On deterrence, see Paul Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); on fascism versus liberalism in Germany, see Moore (fn. 1); on fascism versus liberalism, corporatism, or traditional dictatorship, see Gregory M. Luebbert, “Social Foundations of Political Order in Interwar Europe, ” World Politics 39 (July 1987), 449–78.
5. For example, according to A. J. P. Taylor, “a historian should never deal in speculations about what did not happen”; Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 513. Or, in M. M. Postan's words, “The might-have-beens of history are not a profitable subject of discussion”; quoted in J. D. Gould, “Hypothetical History, ” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 22 (August 1969), 195–207. See also David Hackett Fischer, Historians Fallacies (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), 15—21; and examples given in Peter McClelland, Causal Explanation and Model-Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
6. Weber, “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical Explanation, ” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949); Elster, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds (New York: Wiley, 1978); citations below (fn. 56); and Nelson Polsby, ed., What If?: Essays in Social Science Fiction (Lexington, Mass.: Lewis Publishing, 1982).
7. I am relying here on what David Lewis calls “metalinguistic” theories of counterfactuals. These hold that “a counterfactual is true, or assertable, if and only if its antecedent, together with suitable further premises, implies its consequent”; Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 65. The “further premises” may include both facts and causal laws, or “lawlike generalizations.” For example, the counterfactual “If that match had been struck, it would have lit” is true given the existence of certain laws concerning sulfur, oxygen, friction, and heat, plus certain factual conditions, including a dry match, presence of oxygen, etc. A counterfactual is thus a “condensed or incomplete argument” (J. L. Mackie, “Counterfactuals and Causal Laws, ” in R. J. Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy [Blackwell: Oxford, 1962], 68). There are other accounts of what makes a counterfactual true (or assertable), based on notions of distance between “possible worlds”; see Lewis.
8. Van Evera (fn. 7); Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984, ” International Security 9 (Summer 1984), 108—146.
9. Of course, each step of this process—from identifying a sample to interpreting relative importance—is fraught with methodological peril. Both strategies, it should be emphasized, are risky.
10. I want to suggest that counterfactual reasoning must underlie efforts to infer or assess the relative weights of causes in case studies where the analyst's degrees of freedom in the actual world are negative. In practice, those who use case studies often resort as well to casual comparisons with other actual cases (e.g., “Whereas in many other African countries…, in Kenya…”) and testing multiple implications of a theory; see Donald Campbell, “ Degrees of Freedom and the Case Study, ” Comparative Political Studies 8 (July 1975), 178–93.
11. Van Evera (fn. 7).
12. There is, however, more than one meaningful sense to the idea of causal importance in a regression model. See J. Merrill Shanks, “The Importance of Importance” (Working pa
13. Cf. Jack Levy, “Domestic Politics and War, ” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988), 653–73.
14. Another tack on this puzzle is taken by Campbell (fn. 17).
15. E.g., Youssef Cohen, “Democracy from Above: The Political Origins of Military Dictatorship in Brazil, ” World Politics 40 (October 1987), 30-54; Hyug Baeg Im, “The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea, ” World Politics 39 (January 1987), 231-57; Joanne Gowa, “Hegemons, IOs, and Markets: The Case of the Substitution Account, ” International Organization 38 (Autumn 1984), 661–83.
16. For examples, see articles in Frederic Deyo, ed., The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
17. As the preceding discussion should suggest, an N = 1 case study in which causal inferences are drawn is, strictly speaking, impossible, since other counterfactual cases must be invoked to support causal claims. I use N here to refer to the number of cases in the actual world. On the idea of actual versus possible worlds, see Michael Loux, ed., The Possible and Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
18. Jervis, “War and Misperception, ” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988), 684.
19. Van Evera (fn. 7).
20. Van Evera (fn. 7), 105 (emphasis added).
21. Scott Sagan, “1914 Revisited”, International Security 2 (Fall 1986), 151—75, at 159 (emphasis added).
22. See also Snyder's response to Sagan's critique and Sagan's reply, International Security 9 (Winter 1986–87), 187–98. Their discussion is carried out largely in the realm of the counterfactual (e.g., what was the probability that the Schlieffen plan would work).
23. The Hollandization thesis is developed by John Mueller in Retreat from Doomsday (New York: Basic Books, 1989), where he argues that gradual changes in the government and societies of advanced industrial states have made them more peaceable in their external affairs. For a review of arguments on the causes of the long peace, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 8.
24. Depending on how one counts the “poles, ” neither does bipolarity; see Waltz (fn. 1).
25. Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World, ” International Security 13 (Fall 1988), 55–79, at 56 (emphasis added).
26. Ibid., 68–69.
27. The fortunate absence of actual cases of nuclear conflict has led a number of historians and political scientists to reflect on the role of counterfactuals in nuclear history. See John Lewis Gaddis, “Nuclear Weapons and International Systemic Stability, ” American Academy of Arts and Sciences Occasional Paper No. 2 (Cambridge: AAAS, 1990). This paper was prepared for an AAAS workshop entitled “Nuclear History and the Use of Counterfactuals.” In a different vein, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein (“Beyond Deterrence, ” Journal of Social Issues 43 [Winter 1987], 3–71) have briefly discussed the role of counterfactuals in defining a sample of cases of successful deterrence.
28. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
29. Stepan, “Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil, ” ibid. For other examples, see Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), and citations in fn. 23.
30. Stepan (fn. 40), 134, and see also 120.
31. Stepan (fn. 40), 129 and 130.
32. Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method, ” American Political Science Review 65 (September 1971), 682–93.
33. Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
34. Moore (fn. I), 430. See also Alexander L. George et al., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), 227.
35. Skocpol (fn. 4). Only four of these “negative cases” are treated explicitly and at length, though Skocpol is well aware that others mentioned are used in the same fashion.
36. Ibid., e.g., 63.
37. Luebbert (fn. 8), 457–58 (emphasis added).
38. Ibid., 452.
39. Luebbert (fn. 8), 466.
40. Weber (fn. 10), 164 (emphasis in original).
41. Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); McClelland (fn. 9); Gould (fn. 9); Fritz Redlich, “New and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdependence, ” Journal of Economic History 25 (1965), 480-95; and T. A. Climo and P. G. A Howells, “Possible Worlds in Historical Explanation, ” History and Theory 15 (1976), 1–20. Fischer (fn. 9) lists further references.
42. Elster (fn. 10). See also Elster, Explaining Technical Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. I; idem, “Reply to Comments, ” Inquiry 23 (June 1980), 213-32; Steven Lukes, “Elster on Counterfactuals, ” Inquiry 23 (June 1980), 145-55; Brian Barry, “Superfox, ” Political Studies 28 (1980), 139–43. Political scientists have broached issues raised by counterfactuals in a variety of places. See, for example, Alexander George and Timothy McKeown, “Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making, ” in Robert Coulam and Richard Smith, eds.: Advances in Information Processing in Organizations (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), 2:33-34; Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 39; Donald Moon, “The Logic of Political Inquiry: A Synthesis of Opposed Perspectives, ” in Nelson Polsby and Fred Greenstein, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 1:131—228.
43. Nelson Goodman, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals, ” Journal of Philosophy 44 (1947), 113–38, reprinted in his Fact Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Lewis (fn. 14); Ernest Sosa, ed., Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Part of the philosophical interest in counterfactuals arises from their bearing on key issues in the philosophy of science. See Frederick Suppes, “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories, ” in Suppes, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 3–232, at 36–45, and references cited there; Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), Nagel (chap. 15) also saw that counterfactuals play a key role in historical explanation.
44. Loux (fn. 25).
45. Martin (fn. 20). See also Martin, “Beyond Positivism: A Research Program for Philosophy of History, ” Philosophy of Science 48 (1981), 112—21; and idem, “Singular Causal Explanation, ” Theory and Decision 2 (1972), 221—237.
46. Edward Hallet Carr, What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962); Gaddis (fn. 38).
47. On these, see Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg, Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
48. For example, Luebbert (fn. 8) might have distinguished more carefully between the conditions prevailing in particular countries that allowed the causes of regime type—coalition membership—to operate as they did. On related philosophical distinctions between causes and conditions, see J. L. Mackie, “Causes and Conditions, ” in Sosa (fn. 57), 15-38; and Martin (fn. 59, 1981, 1982).
49. Carr (fn. 60), citing Churchill.
50. Eister (fn. 10).
51. Fogel (fn. 55).
52. Eister (fn. 56, 1983), 38.
53. Eister (fn. 10), 185.
54. For related criticisms of Elster's notion of counterfactual legitimacy, see Barry (fn. 56); and Lukes (fn. 56).
55. Goodman (fn. 57, 1983), 15–17. See also references in fn. 14. Goodman points out that it is quite problematic to use a counterfactual to define general truth conditions for counterfactuals. See Mackie (fn. 14) for a possible way around this problem (which at any rate may be of greater interest to philosophers than to political scientists).