Jason Seawright's research while affiliated with Northwestern University and other places
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Publications (57)
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
Chapter 1 discusses the problem of finding research projects, introduces the breadth of tools available for solving that problem, and offers a roadmap for the rest of the book.
Chapter 11 concludes our study with a close look at the transition from exploration to testing. First, we discuss various steps involved in vetting a research project. This includes a calculation of costs, payoffs, and risks; a consideration of research ethics; and extensive market-testing. In the second section, we discuss when to go public with p...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an...
In this paper we outline a new area of research, social science reception: how inferences are reached by social scientists.
In this paper we outline a new area of research, social science reception: how inferences are reached by social scientists. Specifically, we ask how the nature of the evidence affects the sort of causal inferences that social scientists draw. As an exemplar, we focus on multimethod research. Specifically, we subject respondents to an experiment in...
Scholarship on multimethod case selection in the social sciences has developed rapidly in recent years, but many possibilities remain unexplored. This essay introduces an attractive and advantageous new alternative, involving the selection of extreme cases on the treatment variable, net of the statistical influence of the set of known control varia...
Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource r...
Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource r...
While statistical analysis of the origins and stability of democracy has received a great deal of scholarly effort, and made major contributions to comparative politics, valid causal inference in this tradition remains exceptionally difficult and, perhaps, elusive. Three important challenges create difficulty for scholars who seek to assess the sta...
Chapter 2 focuses on billionaires’ general political activity, as well as their words and actions related to economic issues. It describes our web-scraping research techniques, which were used to identify all statements made by the wealthiest one hundred billionaires, over a ten year period, about many specific policies related to taxes and Social...
Chapter 3 explores in more depth the tax- and Social Security-related words and actions of four particular billionaires—Warren Buffett, John Menard Jr., Carl Icahn, and David Koch. These four were carefully selected to provide methodological leverage on issues of causal inference, causal mechanisms, and possible measurement errors, so that a closer...
Chapter 1 introduces the billionaires who are the primary subjects of the book: the one hundred wealthiest US billionaires, those who occupy the upper reaches of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. The chapter profiles some of the billionaires near the top of the list, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charles and David Koch, the Walton...
Chapter 5 examines the major financial investments certain billionaires have made on the state and local levels. It also examines the substantial impacts that these investments have had, particularly in states like Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina. In those states, billionaires and organizations that they control have helped elect extremely we...
Chapter 4 applies our web-scraping and public records techniques to billionaires’ statements and actions concerning certain social, cultural, or moral issues. We find little evidence of stealth politics on the issues of abortion or same-sex marriage, where billionaires’ policy preferences tend to be less divergent from those of the general public t...
The Life and Death of Political Parties Since Latin America’s Third Wave - Volume 60 Issue 2 - Jason Seawright
Social scientists are commonly advised to deduce and test all observable implications of their theories. We describe a principled framework for testing such "elaborate" theories: nonparametric combination. Nonparametric combination (NPC) assesses the joint probability of observing the theoretically predicted pattern of results under the sharp null...
Qualitative and multimethod scholars face a wide and often confusing array of alternatives for case selection using the results of a prior regression analysis. Methodologists have recommended alternatives including selection of typical cases, deviant cases, extreme cases on the independent variable, extreme cases on the dependent variable, influent...
O desafio de encontrar as ferramentas adequadas para validar o processo de mensurar, tem sido objeto de preocupação permanente, na Ciência Política. Este artigo procura analisar quatro diferentes modelos de validação, e trás exemplos da pesquisa transnacional sobre democracia: a abordagem os níveis-de-medição, o modelo de equação estrutural com var...
The challenge of finding appropriate tools of measurement validation is an abiding concern in political science. This article considers four traditions of validation, using examples from comparative research on democracy: the levels-of-measurement (LoM) approach, structural-equation modeling with latent variables (SEM-L), the pragmatic tradition, a...
There can be little doubt that the wealthiest Americans exert more political influence than the less affluent do. But there has been little systematic evidence about precisely what sorts of public policies the wealthy want government to pursue, or how the policy preferences of wealthy Americans resemble or differ from the preferences of ordinary ci...
Both data-set observations (DSOs) and causal-process observations (CPOs) are important for causal inference. DSOs – located in the standard “rectangular data set” of statistical analysis – make their contribution through a quantitative logic of comparison, frequently using different forms and extensions of regression analysis. They are deservedly a...
Social scientists are commonly advised to make their theories “elaborate” — that is, to deduce and test all the observable implications of their theories. While many scholars attempt to follow this advice, they typically combine the resulting tests informally, which can be seriously misleading if the tests are not independent. In this paper, we des...
Numerous studies have found that proportional electoral rules significantly increase women's representation in national parliaments relative to majoritarian and mixed rules. These studies, however, suffer from serious methodological problems including the endogeneity of electoral laws, poor measures of cultural variables, and neglect of time trends...
Typologies are a well-established analytic tool in the social sciences. Working with typologies contributes decisively to forming concepts, exploring dimensionality, establishing measurement categories, and grouping cases. Yet some critics – basing their arguments on what they believe to be relevant norms of quantitative measurement – consider typo...
Both qualitative and quantitative research routinely fall short, producing misleading causal inferences. Because these weaknesses are in part different, we are convinced that multi-method strategies are productive. Each approach can provide additional leverage that helps address shortcomings of the other. This position is quite distinct from that o...
Emotional states are central to understanding how a new or outsider party's electorate emerges, providing a unifying micro-level theoretical account that potentially reconciles di- verse behavioral findings through a simple underlying psychological mechanism. When voters are broadly angry about the state of society, that anger reduces their degree...
How can scholars select cases from a large universe for in-depth case study analysis? Random sampling is not typically a viable approach when the total number of cases to be selected is small. Hence attention to purposive modes of sampling is needed. Yet, while the existing qualitative literature on case selection offers a wide range of suggestions...
This article describes the categories and typologies as an optic for looking at concept formation and measurement. It also provides an overview of the multiple contributions of typologies and presents numerous examples from diverse subfields of political science. It gives a framework for working with multidimensional typologies, outlining the build...
Discussions of Charles C. Ragin’s Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) have not adequately considered the assumptions about
causation on which this method depends. Yet in evaluating any method, it is important to ask the question: How many untestable,
or hard-to-test, assumptions must be met for us to believe the findings it produces? Advocates o...
The qualitative-quantitative distinction may be understood in terms of four dimensions: level of measurement, size of the N, use of statistical tests, and thick versus thin analysis. Each of these dimensions is associated with distinctive forms of analytic leverage. Many studies correspond neatly to the “qualitative” or “quantitative” side of all f...
Previous researchers have argued that necessary and/or sufficient causes should be tested through research designs that consider only cases with limited combinations of scores on the independent and the dependent variables. I explore the utility for causal inference of the design proposed by these authors, as compared to an “All Cases Design.”...
The complex question of what counts as appropriate evidence for necessary and/or sufficient causation merits careful, ongoing discussion. I thank Kevin Clarke (2002) and Bear Braumoeller and Gary Goertz (2002) for their thoughtful responses to my (Seawright 2002) article, and I discuss their comments in turn.
Abstract will be provided by author.
The past decade has witnessed a sea change in political science methodology. Conventional quantitative methods are now the focus of even sharper criticism. The tools of qualitative analysis are being further refined and legitimated in ways that addresses some of these failings. Qualitative tools certainly have their own problems and limitations, bu...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Citations
... However, this latter body of literature pays relatively little attention to the external pressures that generate the demand for such policies. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of two cases, Denmark and the Netherlands, which following Mills, Durepos, and Wiebe (2010) and Gerring and Seawright (2022) can be considered to be paradigm cases of a successful digitalization responseas evidenced by major international rankings, see section 5 for detailsto social acceleration and the dilemma for democratic problem solving. 2 The methodological rationale is to select prominent examples of the phenomenon of successful digitalization strategy to reveal and theorize its key features. Paradigm cases are instrumental in elucidating a phenomenon becauseas prominent cases they have a plethora of (potentially) defining features. ...
... Galvin and Seawright [16] proposed the selection of extreme cases for the treatment variable (the so-called "surprising causes"), net of the statistical influence of the set of known control variables. Schanze [17] analysed the data quality of older-age and cognitively impaired respondents. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/695084257378305-1542732409052_Q64/Daniel-Galvin.jpg)
... The goal of this section is to investigate whether the Capacity measure behaves in the expected manner, and whether it will be useful for investigating theoretical questions regarding state capacity. Following guidance from Adcock and Collier (2001), Seawright and Collier (2014) and McMann et al. (Forthcoming), we examine the new measure in terms of its face validity, content validity, convergent validity, and nomological validity. Figure 1 displays the mean and standard deviation of each country's Capacity posterior distribution in the year 2015, ranked from the highest to the lowest. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272659896336400-1442018593679_Q64/David-Collier-11.jpg)
... 13 The qualifications here are meant to exclude donations to organisations like ALEC, which corporations generally are keen to avoid publicising. On American billionaires' strategies of (self-interested) political influence through 'stealth politics,' see Page, Seawright, and Lacombe (2019). 14 Thanks to Michael Bennett for suggesting this framing. ...
Reference: Economic Power and Democratic Forbearance
... In our analysis, however, we are not only interested in a generic discrepancy in distribution, instead we want to assess what causes the violation of said hypothesis, meaning different centers of the populations' distributions or differences in the dispersion metrics. Our solution is built on top of multi-aspect testing theory [36], with a p-value correction offered by non parametric combinations theory [12], and detailed over the course of this Section. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/302965921910787-1449244112691_Q64/Allan-Dafoe.jpg)
... In fact, successful interventions convey most policy-relevant information (Meier & Gill, 2000) and allow the researcher to trace the conditions of success (May, 1992). Deviant cases are especially suitable for the purpose of modeling the mechanisms of successful cases; they may provide new explanations, update existing models (Gerring, 2007), and support a broad range of discovery-related goals, such as collecting new information about causal pathways, identifying omitted variables, finding unknown causal paths, and uncovering neglected sources of causal heterogeneity (Seawright, 2016). These advantages are particularly relevant when-starting with uniform designs across contexts-one needs to reveal those features that explain the superior performance of the selected cases (Bradley et al., 2009). ...
... This analytic distinction raises more problems than it resolves. O'Donnell There is the need for a robust conceptual framework of formal and informal institutions not only for theoretical purposes (Collier et al. 2008), but also to inform knowledge about the type of institutions that are more likely to promote democratic and economic development (Chang 2007;Dahl 2005;Hare and Davies 2006;Grief 2006;North 1990;North et al. 2009 institutions are called informal institutions (Galligan 2007;Harrington 2008;Schauer 2008). Within the state, the two levels of analytic distinctions generate two types of institutions namely (i) formal state institutions and (ii) informal state institutions. ...
... Quantitative scholars have put forth numerous critiques regarding problematic (particularly causal) inference, measurement errors, and fuzzy-set scoring which, they argue, doubt QCA's reliability and usefulness as a method (see, e.g., Bowers 2014;Braumoeller 2014;Collier 2014;Hug 2013;Krogslund and Michel 2014;Lieberson 2004;Lucas and Szatrowski 2014;Munck 2016;Seawright 2005Seawright , 2014. For instance, some researchers state that QCA algorithms, which are its main analytical procedure, generate inconsistent results when applying the method repeatedly in simulations (Collier 2014;Krogslund and Michel 2014;Lucas and Szatrowski 2014). ...
... Also, because SMDs favour incumbent politicians who happen to be mostly men, parties are less likely to nominate a more diverse set of candidates there (Golder et al., 2017, p. 111;Speck, 2018). The second stage argument relies on a completely different theory which holds that a more confrontational style of political campaigning by candidates arises in SMDs (relative to the less adversarial campaigning in list PR systems) to which men are supposedly more accustomed (Salmond, 2006, p. 177), or which suggests that voters are more hesitant to elect women in head-to-head contests (Roberts et al., 2013(Roberts et al., , p. 1558. ...
... Come sottolineato da Caughey et al (14), la metodologia NPC è un metodo sia univariato sia multivariato basato sui test di permutazione e finalizzato a verificare congiuntamente una serie di ipotesi nulle (per esempio, l'assenza di effetti del trattamento), senza far riferimento alle assunzioni tipiche dei metodi di verifica di ipotesi di tipo parametrico o senza riferirsi ad approssimazioni valide solo in presenza di campioni di grandi dimensioni. ...
