Comparative Historical Analysis

Session Submission Type: Short Course Full Day

Session Description

Comparative historical analysis (CHA) encompasses a methodological tradition that has been widely used for studying problem-driven, macro-historical questions. Like historians, CHA uses the past to formulate research questions, describe complex social processes, and generate new theoretical insights. And like social scientists, CHA compares those patterns to formulate generalizable and testable hypotheses. CHA builds a bridge between these two research traditions and developed a heterodox methodological toolbox.
The course introduces four elements from CHA’s toolbox:
1) Exploration and Description. Figuring out what happened is essential for identifying new research questions of\r updating existing ones. CHA explores by emphasizing description, typologizing, and other tools that help to identify patterns and translate them into research questions.
2) Data Visualization: CHA draws on visualization strategies to make historical transformation visible. These strategies involve developmental typologies, periodizations, time series trends, trees, chronologies, or visualization tools.
3) Temporal Thinking: Problem-driven research often is historical because it is driven by sudden changes (i.e. economic crisis, pandemics, wars) or slower moving trends (i.e. demographic, cultural). CHA employs a refined temporal vocabulary to adequately describe historical processes and cope with the causal complexity that is necessary to explain these processes.
4) Theorizing: Theory plays a central role in CHA’s effort to cope with causal complexity. Theories facilitate a close dialogue between existing theories and new inductive insights. And this dialogue updates existing theories. CHA uses theories particularly to identify confounders that existing theories have overlooked. It also employs causal diagrams to translate theories into transparent data gathering strategies.

The instructor for this session is Marcus Kreuzer. He is a Professor of Political Science at Villanova University and has been working on the origins of European and post-communist party systems as well as qualitative methodology. He is the author of The Grammar of Time. A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2023) and published widely on qualitative methods. He has taught CHA courses at the IQMR, ECPR, and MethodsNet summer schools.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Short Courses

Chair

• Marcus Kreuzer Villanova University

Presenter

• Marcus Kreuzer Villanova University