Variation as a social fundamental

Over 700 historians, sociologists, demographers, and political scientists enjoyed a splendid program of panels at the Social Science History Association in Long Beach this week (link). There were panels on recent historical demography, comparative historical analysis, and social mobilization research, as well as a pair of great panels on the work of Charles Tilly. There was even a smattering of papers suggesting possible opportunities for innovation in theory and research methods in historical sociology.  (A book panel on Neil Smelser's recent The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys illustrates this point: the book is highly original and demonstrates the value of seeking out new perspectives and angles of view on social behavior and social change.)

Here is one strong impression that emerges from the program.  Variation within a social or historical phenomenon seems to be all but ubiquitous. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China, demographic transition in early modern Europe, the ideology of a market society, or the experience of being black in America. We have the noun -- "Cultural Revolution" -- which can be explained or defined in a sentence or two as an extended social phenomenon of mobilization and conflict that took place in China from 1966-76; and we have the complex underlying social realities to which it refers, spread out over many cities, villages, and communes across China (The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History).  Or consider another general noun, "demographic transition," defined as a period in which a population experiences abrupt decline in mortality, followed by a decline in fertility.  Using a variety of statistical methods, historical demographers can document the occurrence of a demographic transition in different periods in Sweden, Italy, Britain, and China.  And it turns out that there are both common features and distinguishing characteristics that emerge from detailed study -- differences in timing, differences in social composition, differences in the mechanisms bringing these changes about.

In each case there is a very concrete and visible degree of variation in the factor over time and place. Historical and social research in a wide variety of fields confirms the non-homogeneity of social phenomena and the profound location-specific variations that occur in the characteristics of virtually all large social phenomena. Social nouns do not generally designate uniform social realities (post).  These facts of local and regional variation provide an immediate rationale for case studies and comparative research, selecting different venues of the phenomenon and identifying specific features of the phenomenon in this location. Through a range of case studies it is possible for the research community to map out both common features and distinguishing features of a given social process.

This description focuses on locational variation in processes -- village to village, country to country. But social scientists often also highlight variations across social segments within a given location: class, race, gender, religion, occupation.  Do sharecroppers have a different fertility profile over time than the wealthy in a particular region at a particular time?  Are there significant differences in survival strategies for distinct groups defined by race or ethnicity in a city or a group of cities?

This situation of variation and case-specific research raises a number of challenging questions. One is the question of whether the phenomenon designated by the noun is one integrated social reality, with varied expressions across locations, or whether instead the different locations are simply loosely similar but independent occurrences. Simon Schama's radical question -- was there a French Revolution, or were there simply a congeries of periods and locations of disturbance? -- illustrates this question (post), as does a previous discussion of the revolutions of 1848 (post).

A second major question is the challenge of discovering causal and social mechanisms connecting the various social locations encompassed by the phenomenon. How did the activism and ideology of Cultural Revolution spread from Beijing to Nanjing and other locations? How did activism spread from city to rural locations? How did local circumstances cause changes and variations in the political movement? How much path dependency existed in the spread of revolutionary ideas and strategies?

There is a more epistemic set of questions as well, concerning generalizability. Fundamentally, if there is substantial variation across locations and instances of a given phenomenon, then to what degree can we say anything about the phenomenon as a whole? And what does the study of one location allow us to say about the larger processes? Does study of the Tsinghua student Red Guard movement tell us anything about Red Guard mobilization in other places? Or is it simply one of many different and contingent develoments of contentious politics during the period?  Can we generalize from case studies and comparative research?

We can also look at the problem from the other end of the telescope: are there any social phenomena that occur fairly homogeneously across all places where this phenomenon occurs?  Candidates might include:

• Anti-Semitic violence across 19th-century Ukraine villages
• Marriage / fertility practices across rural Sweden 1700-1800
• Peasant revolts in medieval Germany
• Process of protoindustrialization in villages and towns in Low Countries 1300-1600 (Industrialization Before Industrialization)
  

For examples like these we can ask a symmetrical set of questions to those posed above. What factors explain the uniformity of results for these processes across separate locations? Various explanations are possible:

• There is a common set of conditions across the regions (e.g. famine or drought)
• There are common causes that mobilize people in many separate places (tax protests, land confiscations)
  
• There are common political traditions
• There is substantial inter-location communication and influence
• There are no large institutional or circumstantial variations that would drive significant variations in outcomes across locations

This is where the appeal to social mechanisms seems once more to be highly relevant and helpful.  If we work on the assumption that any large social process -- the dispersed locations of contention associated with the French Revolution, say -- is the compound result of a set of underlying causal social mechanisms, and if we hypothesize that many of these mechanisms are in play in some places but not in others; then we can explain both similarity and difference in the occurrence of the phenomenon across time and place.  Now the work of historical investigation can be put in these terms: identify some of the social mechanisms that evidently recur in various locations; identify some of the mechanisms that lead to significantly different results in some places; and identify some of the cross-location mechanisms that are at work to secure a degree of synchrony and parallel in the developments observed in different locations (communication systems, networks of leaders, dissemination of activists).  Case studies and comparative research permit both a degree of generalization and an explanation of variation.

In other words, the intellectual strategy here is to disaggregate the large social factor into the results of a larger number of underlying mechanisms; and then to attempt to discover how these mechanisms played out differently in different settings throughout the range of the French Revolution, protoindustrialization, or ethnic conflict in South Asia.  Significantly, this is exactly the strategy of research and explanation that Charles Tilly was led to in his emphasis on discovering the component social mechanisms that underlie social contention (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, Dynamics of Contention).

MacIntyre and Taylor on the human sciences

There is a conception of social explanation that provides a common starting point for quite a few theories and approaches in a range of the social sciences. I'll call it the "rational, material, structural" paradigm. It looks at the task of social science as the discovery of explanations of social outcomes; and it brings an intellectual framework of purposive rationality, material social factors, and social structures exercising causal influence on individuals as the foundation of social explanation. Rational choice theory, Marxian economics, historical sociology, and the new institutionalism can each be described in roughly these terms: show how a given set of outcomes are the result of purposive choices by individuals within a given set of material and structural circumstances. These approaches depend on a highly abstracted description of human agency, with little attention to deep and important differences in agency across social, cultural, and historical settings. "Agents like these, in structures like those, produce outcomes like these." This is a powerful and compelling approach; so it is all the more important to recognize that there are other possible starting points for the social sciences.

In fact, this approach to social explanation stands in broad opposition to another important approach, the interpretivist approach. On the interpretive approach, the task of the human sciences is to understand human activities, actions, and social formations as unique historical expressions of human meaning and intention. Individuals are unique, and there are profound differences of mentality across historical settings. This "hermeneutic" approach is not interested in discovering causes of social outcomes, but instead in piecing together an interpretation of the meanings of a social outcome or production. This contrast between causal explanation and hermeneutic interpretation ultimately constitutes a major divide between styles of social thinking. (Yvonne Sherratt provides a very fine introduction to this approach; Continental Philosophy of Social Science.) Max Ringer, one of Weber's most insightful intellectual biographers, places this break at the center of Weber's development in the early twentieth century (Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences). (See earlier discussions of two strands of thought in the philosophy of social science; link, link, link.)

On this approach, all social action is framed by a meaningful social world. To understand, explain, or predict patterns of human behavior, we must first penetrate the social world of the individual in historical concreteness: the meanings he/she attributes to her environment (social and natural); the values and goals she possesses; the choices she perceives; and the way she interprets other individuals' social action. Only then will we be able to analyze, interpret, and explain her behavior. But now the individual's action is thickly described in terms of the meanings, values, assumptions, and interpretive principles she employs in her own understanding of her world.

Most of the arguments in support of interpretive approaches to the human sciences have come from the continental tradition -- Dilthey, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas. So let's consider two philosophers who have made original contributions to the historicist and interpretivist side of the debate, within the Anglo-American tradition. Consider first Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of the possibility of comparative theories of politics ("Is a science of comparative politics possible?" in Alan Ryan, ed., The Philosophy of Social Explanation). MacIntyre poses the problem in these terms: "I shall be solely interested in the project of a political science, of the formulation of cross cultural, law-like causal generalizations which may in turn be explained by theories" (172). And roughly, MacIntyre's answer is that a science of comparative politics is not possible, because actions, structures, and practices are not directly comparable across historical settings. The Fiat strike pictured above is similar in some ways to a strike against General Motors or Land Rover in different times and places; but the political cultures, symbolic understandings, and modes of behavior of Italian, American, and British auto workers are profoundly different.

MacIntyre places great emphasis on the densely interlinked quality of local concepts, social practices, norms, and self ascriptions, with the implication that each practice or attitude is inextricably dependent on an ensemble of practices, beliefs, norms, concepts, and the like that are culturally specific and, in their aggregate, unique. Thus MacIntyre holds that as simple a question as this: "Do Britons and Italians differ in the level of pride they take in civic institutions?" is unanswerable because of cultural differences in the concept of pride (172-73).

Hence we cannot hope to compare an Italian's attitude to his government's acts with an Englishman's in respect of the pride each takes; any comparison would have to begin from the different range of virtues and emotions incorporated in the different social institutions. Once again the project of comparing attitudes independently of institutions and practices encounters difficulties. (173-74)

These points pertain to difficulties in identifying political attitudes cross-culturally. Could it be said, though, that political institutions and practices are less problematic? MacIntyre argues that political institutions and practices are themselves very much dependent on local political attitudes, so it isn't possible to provide an a-historical specification of a set of practices and institutions:

It is an obvious truism that no institution or practice is what it is, or does what it does, independently of what anyone whatsoever thinks or feels about it. For institutions and practices are always partially, even if to differing degrees, constituted by what certain people think and feel about them. (174)

So interpretation is mandatory -- for institutions no less than for individual behavior. So MacIntyre's position is disjunctive. He writes:

My thesis . . . can now be stated distinctively: either such generalizations about institutions will necessarily lack the kind of confirmation they require or they will be consequences of true generalizations about human rationality and not part of a specifically political science. (178)

Now turn to Charles Taylor in another pivotal essay, "Interpretation and the sciences of man" (Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences). Taylor's central point is that the subject matter of the human sciences -- human actions and social arrangements -- always require interpretation. It is necessary for the observer to attribute meaning and intention to the action -- features that cannot be directly observed. He asks whether there are "brute data" in the human sciences -- facts that are wholly observational and require no "interpretation" on the part of the scientist (19)? Taylor thinks not; and therefore the human sciences require interpretation from the most basic description of data to the fullest historical description.

To be a full human agent, to be a person or a self in the ordinary meaning, is to exist in a space defined by distinctions of worth. . . . My claim is that this is not just a contingent fact about human agents, but is essential to what we would understand and recognize as full, normal human agency. (3)

Thus, human behaviour seen as action of agents who desire and are moved, who have goals and aspirations, necessarily offers a purchase for descriptions in terms of meaning what I have called "experiential meaning". (27)

One way of putting Taylor's critique of "brute data" is the idea that human actions must be characterized intentionally (34 ff.) in terms of the intentions and self understanding of the agent and that such factors can only be interpreted, not directly observed.

My thesis amounts to an alternative statement of the main proposition of interpretive social science, that an adequate account of human action must make the agents more understandable. On this view, it cannot be a sufficient objective of social theory that it just predict . . . the actual pattern of social or historical events. . . . A satisfactory explanation must also make sense of the agents. (116)

Taylor's discussion of ethnocentricity is important, since it provides a way out of the hermeneutic circle. He believes it is possible to interpret the alien culture without simply covertly projecting our categories onto the alien; and this we do through meaningful conversation with the other (124-25). This is a point that seems to converge with Habermas's notion of communicative action (The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society).

It isn't entirely clear how radically Taylor intends his argument. Is it that all social science requires interpretation, or that interpretation is a legitimate method among several? Is there room for generalizations and theories within Taylor's interpretive philosophy of social science? What should social science look like on Taylor's approach? Will it offer explanations, generalizations, models; or will it be simply a collection of concrete hermeneutical readings of different societies? Does causation have a place in such a science? (He says more about the role of theory in "Neutrality in political science"; Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 63.)

Both MacIntyre and Taylor are highlighting an important point: human actions reflect purposes, beliefs, emotions, meanings, and solidarities that cannot be directly observed. And human practices are composed of the actions and thoughts of individual human actors -- with exactly this range of hermeneutic possibilities and indeterminacies. So the explanation of human action and practice presupposes some level of interpretation. There is no formula, no universal key to human agency, that permits us to "code" human behavior without the trouble of interpretation.

This said, I would still judge that the "rational, material, structural" paradigm with which we began has plenty of scope for application. For some purposes and in many historical settings, it is possible to describe the actor's state of mind in more abstract terms: he/she cares about X, Y, Z; she believes A, B, C; and she reasons that W is a good way of achieving a satisfactory level of attainment of the goods she aims at. In other words, purposive agency, within an account of the opportunities and constraints that surround action, provides a versatile basis for social action. And this is enough for much of political science, Marxist materialism, and the new institutionalism.

Contingent historical development

Here's a relatively limited historical puzzle to solve. A powerful new technology -- the railroad -- was developed in the first part of the nineteenth century. The nature and characteristics of the technology were essentially homogeneous across the national settings in which it appeared in Europe and North America. However, it was introduced and built out in three countries -- the United States, Britain, and France -- in markedly different ways. The ways in which the railroads and their technologies were regulated and encouraged were very different in the three countries, and the eventual rail networks had very different properties in the three countries. The question for explanation is this: can we explain the differences in these three national experiences on the basis of some small set of structural or cultural differences that existed among the three countries and that causally explain the resulting differences in build-out, structure, and technical frameworks? Or, possibly, are the three historical experiences different simply because of the occurrence of a large but cumulative number of unimportant and non-systemic events?

These are the questions that historical sociologist Frank Dobbin poses in his book, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age. He argues that there were significantly different cultures of political and industrial policy in the three countries that led to substantial differences in the ways in which government and business interacted in the development of the railroads. "Each Western nation-state developed a distinct strategy for governing industry" (1). The laissez-faire culture of the United States permitted a few large railroad magnates and corporations to make the crucial decisions about technology, standards, and routes that would govern the development of the rail system. The regulated market culture of Great Britain favored smaller companies and strove to prevent the emergence of a small number of oligopolistic rail companies. And the technocratic civil-service culture of France gave a great deal of power to the engineers and civil servants who were charged to make decisions about technology choice, routes, and standards.

These differences led to systemic differences in the historical implementation of the railroads, the rail networks that were developed, and the regulatory regimes that surrounded them. The U.S. rail network developed as the result of competition among a small number of rail magnates for the most profitable routes. This turned out to favor a few east-west trunk lines connecting urban centers, including New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. The British rail network gave more influence to municipalities who demanded service; as a result, the network that developed was a more distributed one across a larger number of cities. And the French rail network was rationally designed to conform to the economic and military needs of the French state, with a system of rail routes that largely centered on Paris. These differences are evident in the maps at the top of the posting.

This example illustrates the insights that can be distilled from comparative historical sociology. Dobbin takes a single technology and documents a range of outcomes in the way in which the technology is built out into a national system. And he attempts to isolate the differences in structures and cultures in the three settings that would account for the differences in outcomes. He offers a causal analysis of the development of the technology in the three settings, demonstrating how the mechanism of policy culture imposes effects on the development of the technology. The inherent possibilities represented by the technology intersect with the economic circumstances and the policy cultures of the three national settings, and the result is a set of differentiated organizations and outcomes in the three countries. The analysis is rich in its documentation of the social mechanisms through which policy culture influenced technology development; the logic of his analysis is more akin to process tracing than to the methods of difference and similarity in Mill's methods.

The research establishes several important things. First, it refutes any sort of technological determinism, according to which the technical characteristics of the technology determine the way it will be implemented. To the contrary, Dobbin's work demonstrates the very great degree of contingency that existed in the social implementation of the railroad. Second, it makes a strong case for the idea that an element of culture -- the framework of assumptions, precedents, and institutions defining the "policy culture" of a country -- can have a very strong effect on the development of large social institutions. Dobbin emphasizes the role that things like traditions, customs, and legacies play in the unfolding of important historical developments. And finally, the work makes it clear that these highly contingent pathways of development nonetheless admit of explanation. We can identify the mechanisms and local circumstances that led, in one instance, to a large number of firms and hubs and in the other, a small number of firms and trunk lines.

How the calendar matters

It is interesting to consider how the timing of a routine social event can have a major effect on outcomes. Malcolm Gladwell observes that the most talented Canadian hockey players in the NHL are disproportionately likely to have birthdays in the months of January or February in his recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Observers of the current US presidential election may speculate that, if the financial crisis of September had occurred in May, the outcome of the election might have been different. The generation of Americans born around 1915 are much like those born around 1945 -- except for the searing experience their generation had of the great depression.

The lesson to be drawn here might seem to be the obvious and trivial one -- context matters in human affairs. Because youth hockey leagues define the age of a player based on his age on December 31, the January children have a major advantage in size and physical development over the November children. And this advantage creates a small headstart that amplifies over time. The fact that the financial crisis of 2008 created a major disadvantage for the McCain ticket less than 60 days ahead of the election made it very difficult for the candidate to recover in the polls. The cohort experience of poverty and insecurity made the 1920 generation much more risk averse than the 1950 generation. So context and the timing of contextual events matters.

But perhaps the importance of the calendar goes deeper than this. In an earlier posting I discussed Victor Lieberman's discovery of an unexpected synchronicity of political change at the far ends of Eurasia, over the course of a millenium. We tried to understand this pattern in terms of hypothetical social mechanisms that might have produced these parallels. But what is striking about the example is not simply the fact that there must have been underlying causal mechanisms; it is that the result is a weakly synchronized system of events -- that is, a system of events with a regular temporal association -- that might never have been noticed.

What this suggests to me is that the social sciences can profitably give more attention to the temporal features of social phenomena -- the simultaneous experiences a group of people would have had in virtue of being part of the same age cohort, the temporal parallels that might exist between the rise of a mass ideology and the sales of particular books, the accidents of simultaneity that have major repercussions decades later. Causal analysis implicitly imposes a temporal structure on events (causes precede effects). But often the research goal is to strip away the particular timing and temporal context, and to treat causal structures purely abstractly. And this means deliberately taking causal pairs out of their particular temporal contexts and comparing them with temporally disconnected alternative examples.

Andrew Abbott takes up some aspects of these issues in "Conceptions of Time and Events in Social Science Methods" in Time Matters: On Theory and Method. And William Sewell's critique of some forms of causal reasoning in comparative historical sociology in "Three Temporalities" in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation is highly relevant as well.

Social science history and historical social science

Social science methods and historical explanation seem to come together in several different ways; what can we say about the differences of approach between “history using the tools of the social sciences” and “social science research that pays close attention to history”?

E. P. Thompson treats the making of the English working class. His work is multi-faceted. He gives treatment of workingmen’s organizations and publications; churches and pastors; riots and chants; petitions to parliament; and much else. The story is historical in several respects: it provides an account of change over time and it engages in detailed and fine-grained description of specific circumstances in the past. Is Thompson attempting to explain something? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that his aim is to describe this extended, multi-location, multi-group process of “making”, along with some sense of the circumstances and features of agency that brought this “class” into being. And he goes out of his way to emphasize the contingency of the story that he tells: this “class” could have taken a very different shape, depending on altered circumstances and agency along the way. His is as much like the work of a biographer, detailing the development of personality, the contingencies of personal history, the formation of character, and the actions of the mature person.

Charles Tilly treats the development of contentious politics in France over three centuries. His account too is “historical”: it describes the development and diversity of contentious politics in France through revolution and periods of quiet. His account too is attentive to difference; he emphasizes the many ways in which French contentious “underclass” politics varied across time and across region. The politics of workers in Paris were quite different from those of the winemakers of the Vendée. But Tilly’s account is deliberately sociological and theoretical. The goal of his study is to discover causes; to test a few theoretical hypotheses about mobilization; and to use the “data” of French working class history as a basis for testing and evaluating sociological theory.

Each of these examples is a major intellectual contribution; each contributes to our historical understanding; each focuses on a historically situated working class. But the two oeuvres have substantial differences of orientation and feel. One is explicitly theoretical in its goals; the other is nuanced and descriptive. One aims at arriving at explanations; the other is interested in providing a qualitative understanding of the experience of ordinary men and women of the 18th and 19th centuries in rural England. One is historical social science, while the other is social science history.

So it is an important question within the philosophy of history, to articulate the difference between these two configurations of “social science” and “history.” How are the two genres distinguished? Are they differences of style, each embodying a complex of narrative and explanatory values? Are they at opposing ends of some sort of spectrum, ranging from descriptive to explanatory or concrete to abstract? Or are they actually logically different in some way—perhaps along the lines of the distinction between three conceptions of time described by William Sewell?

Perhaps most extremely, would we be right to consider excluding Tilly’s work from the domain of the “historical” and place it instead within the domain of social science, distinguished from other varieties of social science primarily by the fact that the data upon which it depends are facts about the past? In other words, is it possible to suggest that “historical social science” is not a variety of historical writing at all?

How might we characterize some of the differences between these two bodies of writing about the past? Do they constitute different paradigms, research frameworks, or forms of historical practice? Do they embody different complexes of assumptions about what to emphasize, what the standards of rigor are, what is required by way of description, detail, and fact; what is intended by way of explanation and understanding; the role that interpretation of the lived experience of agents plays; and so on?

Comparative historical social science is a particular instance of historical social science. There is a well-developed contemporary literature on the conceptual and methodological issues raised by comparative historical social science. And the participants in this literature generally seem to come down on the side of the “social science” conclusions rather than the “historical explanations” side of the debate. The goal of comparative social science is to assess causation, and to use knowledge of concrete historical cases as a source of evidence for evaluating causal theories. Examples include the explanation of social revolution (Theda Skocpol), the explanation of social contention (Charles Tilly), the explanation of economic development (R. Bin Wong, Philip Huang), the explanation of labor union politics (Howard Kimmeldorf).

Now let us turn the lens in the other direction and ask, in what ways do the contents of social science knowledge aid in the construction of historical knowledge? What is the role of theory and causal hypothesis in paradigm examples of historical knowledge? Virtually all historians would first insist: “Historical research cannot take the form of application of social science theory to the data. Rather, the historian’s task is to discover the particular and the grain of the materials in front of him. History is not the unfolding of theoretical premises and good historical knowledge does not result from deducing consequences from general social science theories.” That being conceded: are there forms of historical inquiry and knowledge that are importantly and rationally assisted by social science theory?

One variant of historical writing where social science theory is apparently pertinent is in the “causal narrative”. Historians are well served by appealing to social science theories of causal mechanisms in order to explain the transitions that they identify in their causal narratives. This is a logical point. And yet, it is strikingly difficult to find examples of leading historians who make use of social science theory in this way. Philip Huang is an example of a professional historian who makes substantial use of social science theory and concepts; Simon Schama is an example of a historian who is averse to this use. More commonly, the authors who provide causal narratives informed by social science theory are themselves sociologists or other social scientists (Skocpol, Tilly, Wolf, Paige).

It seems from some of these scattered observations, that there is indeed a significant difference between social science history and historical social science. The explanatory goals appear to be different, and the methods of reasoning and standards of rigor and adequacy seem to be distinct as well. So the question of how the disciplinary differences fit together is one that demands continued scrutiny.

Chuck Tilly

Along with many others, I was saddened today to learn that Chuck Tilly has died after a long fight with cancer. His passing is a very sad loss for his family and for the many scholars and friends who were so influenced by his ongoing thinking and writing. And there are hundreds or thousands of younger scholars who received encouragement and stimulation from Chuck throughout his teaching and writing career. They will feel his loss keenly.

Chuck was a deeply innovative thinker who kept coming up with new ideas and perspectives throughout his career -- from his earliest days as a Harvard graduate student, all the way through his difficult illness. I particularly admire the flexibility of his mind as he grappled with the challenge of explaining contentious action. So many of his ideas will continue to shape the way scholars think about these aspects of social life into the twenty-first century.

He was also a tremendously generous man as an intellectual, scholar, and mentor. People who worked with him at Michigan, the New School, and Columbia as graduate students always speak fondly of his warmth and good humor. The courage he demonstrated in facing his final illness is inspiring.

And, of course, many will think with regret of the many books Chuck still intended to write.

Readers who would like to get a sense of the range of Chuck Tilly's thinking and the fertility of his mind may want to visit an interview I conducted with Chuck in December, 2007. A YouTube version can be found here, and a higher resolution downloadable version is here.

The Perestroika debate in political science

A debate has been raging in the discipline of political science for at least a decade, over the nature of the scientific status and methods of the discipline. Fundamentally, the "dissidents" argue that a narrow and "scientistic" conception of what good political science research ought to look like has reigned and has repressed other, more pluralistic approaches to political science research. The formal methods of rational choice theory, game theory, and statistical analysis prevail, and the more narrative approaches associated with comparative research, area studies, and qualitiative research have been marginalized. And, the critics maintain, the flagship journals of the discipline and the tenure committees of the leading departments converge in maintaining this orthodoxy within the discipline. (Kristen Renwick Monroe has edited a valuable collection that gives the reader a pretty good understanding of the origins and faultlines of the debate; Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science).

One of the central issues is this: what should a science of politics involve? What form of knowledge should political science produce? What is the role of universal laws or regularities in political science? How important are predictions?

Another key issue, related to the first, is the issue of the methodology of research that ought to be favored. Should quantitative methods be preferred? Should stylized assumptions be offered as the basis for formal rational-choice models of various forms of political behavior? What role should ethnographic research or case-study research play in the discovery of social-science knowledge?

Sanford Schram identifies some of the strands of the Perestroika critique in these terms: "Some focus on the overly abstract nature of much of the research done today, some on the lack of nuance in decontextualized, large-sample empirical studies, others on the inhumaneness of thinking about social relations in causal terms, and still others on the ways in which contemporary social science all too often fails to produce the kind of knowledge that can meaningfully inform social life" (Monroe : 103).

One of the most useful contributions to the Monroe book mentioned above is an essay by David Laitin. He takes issue with Bent Flyvbjerg's book, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again, and his advocacy of "phronesis". Laitin characterizes the method of phronesis as one that is sensitive to context and that pays close attention to the singular and specific features of a particular social process -- for example, the positioning that occurs as a city decides on its economic development strategy. So the method of phronesis is intentionally not aiming to discover regularities across a set of instances, but rather to uncover some specific features of a particular ongoing process.

Laitin argues that this approach is too narrow a foundation for social-science knowledge. He assimilates the phronesis method to what he calls a "narrative" approach; and he argues that good social science needs to use a three-fold methodology. Investigators should make use of the tools of narrative analysis; but they also need to use statistical methods (quantitative analysis across cases) and formal modeling (models of complex social situations based on assumptions along the lines of rational choice theory). Laitin refers to this approach as a "tripartite" method of comparative research.

Where does the philosophy of social science fit into this debate? I suppose that the philosophy of social science I have advocated has quite a bit in common with the criticisms raised by the Perestroikans. My views emphasize the contingency of social processes, lack of social regularities, multiple conjunctural causes at work, plasticity of social institutions, the value of ethnographic work, and the need for a plurality of methods of inquiry and explanation in the social sciences. And these views are at odds with the natural-science assumptions about how social phenomena ought to be investigated that the Perestroika group is criticizing. And some of the researchers whom I admire most deeply -- James Scott, Charles Tilly, Benedict Anderson, Theda Skocpol, or Susanne Rudolph -- are cited in the original Perestroika manifesto! At the same time, I am committed to the idea of empirical rigor, causal explanation, and making a connection between social science knowledge and practical social problems -- a set of views that are post-positivist but still in the tradition of enlightened empiricism, and opposed to the currents of post-modern jargon that are sometimes mixed into the debate.

So the task is clear: to formulate a conception of social-science research and knowledge that preserves the values of empirical rigor and theoretial clarity, while embracing a pluralism that will permit the formulation of social-science knowledge adequate to the social world and social problems we find around ourselves. The Perestroika debate is an important one, and can help us better in the task of understanding society.

Processes versus structures

Comparative historical sociology seeks to provide an answer to this type of question: what causes certain kinds of large historical outcomes? And it proceeds, often, on the basis of controlled comparison of a small number of cases. Theda Skocpol's classic book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, is a good example of the approach. So far so good. But what kinds of causes do CHS researchers typically look for? The method of comparison is often described in terms of Mill's methods of similarity and difference. Find cases with variation in the outcome to be explained and similar/different causal conditions; and then seek out patterns of co-variation that suggest that certain factors are necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the outcome to be explained. These factors are then said to cause the outcome. (Mill's approach to social research is described in Fred Wilson's entry on Mill in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

This way of formulating the approach has fairly strong ontological presuppositions. Basically, it assumes that social causes are large, pervasive factors that obtain or fail to obtain in the multiple cases. For example, in explaining revolution the investigator might identify food crisis, population density, weak state institutions, and war as potential causal factors, and then compare the cases with respect to the variance of these factors. The comparative method assumes that large social units (societies, regions, social groups) are the operative units, and their causal properties are largescale, pervasive social conditions.

But what if our view of social causation is focused at a more disaggregated level -- not at the level of gross social conditions and structures, but at the level of lower-level processes and mechanisms? What if we thought that the action is really taking place at the level of the contingent unfolding of social processes at more local levels? This ontology wouldn't imply that the large social factors just mentioned are not part of the true causal story. But it would cast serious doubt on the expectation that there will be neat patterns of covariance across cases identified solely at this level. And yet this is exactly what Mill's methods require.

The turn to concrete social mechanisms as the unit of social analysis suggests that it is most fruitful to seek out explanations of outcomes as the "concatenation" of a set of common social mechanisms (Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory). And this implies that the traditional comparative method is not likely to succeed; there won't be a neat pattern of co-variation at the level of macro-characteristics and structures. So what is the alternative?

We might say that a credible alternative, still falling within a broad definition of "comparative historical sociology", is this: select a number of cases for detailed study. Uncover in some detail the processes and factors that appear to have led to the outcome (process-tracing). And arrive at generalizations by discovering that certain mechanisms or processes recur across multiple cases, and that large structural factors interact with these processes in recurring ways.

This is the approach that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly take in Dynamics of Contention. And it would appear to me that this approach permits an appropriate marriage between social ontology and social science methodology. The methodology is suited to the ontological insight that social phenomena are composed of lower-level social mechanisms and processes, and the outcomes are the contingent and path-dependent result of the concatenation of these mechanisms. There are no "laws of revolution" (or war, or civil strife); rather, there are a large number of social mechanisms that can be observed in many instances of these large social outcomes. These mechanisms can be rigorously analyzed, and we can explain outcomes (for example, the success of the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy) as the result of a concatenation of various of these mechanisms.

Paired comparisons

Sidney Tarrow is a gifted and prolific student of comparative politics. (Listen to my interview with Professor Tarrow.) He has spent much of his career trying to understand social movements, contentious politics, and the causes of differences in political behavior across national settings. And one of his special contributions is his ability to think clearly about the methods that social scientists use.

Tarrow attaches a lot of weight to the idea of "paired comparisons" as a method of research and discovery: Locate a few cases that are broadly similar in many respects but different in a way that is important, interesting, or surprising. Then examine the cases in greater detail to attempt to discover what explains the difference between the two cases. (One of his early books that employs this method is From center to periphery: Alternative models of national-local policy impact and an application to France and Italy.)

Nothing special turns on "pairs" here; what Tarrow is describing is really the logic of small-N comparative research. The point about the broad similarity that is the basis for choosing the cases follows from the logic of causation: if we presuppose that the outcome P is caused by some set of antecedent social and political conditions and we know that C1 and C2 have different outcomes -- then the more factors we can "control" for by finding cases in which these factors are constant, the better. This is so, because it demonstrates that none of the constant factors in the two cases are the cause of variation in outcome. And this limits our investigation of possible causes to the factors in which the cases differ.

If this sounds like Mill's methods of similarity and difference, that's appropriate -- the logic is the same, so far as I can see. Here is Mill's method of difference:

A B C D -E => P
A B -C D -E => -P

And in this case -- making the heroic assumption that A,B,C,D,E exhaust all possible causes of P, and that the cause of P is deterministic rather than probabilistic -- then we can infer that the presence of C causes P.

This reasoning doesn't take us to a valid conclusion to the effect that C is the only factor that is causally relevant to the occurrence of P; it is possible, for example, that there is a third case along these lines:

-A B -C D -E => -P

This would demonstrate that A is a necessary condition for the occurrence of P; withhold A and P disappears. And each of the other factors might also play a role as a necessary condition. So it would be necessary to observe as many as 32 cases (2^5) in order to sort out the status of A through E as either necessary or sufficient conditions for the occurrence of P. (The logic of this kind of causal reasoning is explored more fully in my essay, "An Experiment in Causal Reasoning," which is also published in Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation.)

But I don't think that Tarrow is intending to advance the method of paired comparison as a formal method of causal inference, along the lines of inductive or deductive logic. Instead, I think he is making the plausible point that this method should be understood as a part of an intelligent research strategy. Social processes are complex. We are interested in explaining variation across cases. And we probably have the best likelihood of discovering important causal relationships if we can reduce the number of moving parts (the other kinds of variation that occur across the cases).

Tarrow gives an example of the application of the method of paired comparisions in the context of his early study of the political fortunes of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the south of Italy. In this case the paired comparison involves northern Italy and southern Italy. Both are subject to the same national political structures; both populations speak Italian; both populations have an Italian national identity. However, the PCI was fairly successful in mobilizing support and winning elections based on a militant political program in the north, and was persistently unsuccessful in doing these things in the south. What explains the difference?

As Tarrow explains his reasoning, his expectation in conducting the research was a "structural" one. He expected that there would be large structural factors in post-war Italy -- features of economic and political institutions -- that would explain the difference in outcome for PCI political activism. And there were indeed large structural differences in social organization in the two regions. Northern Italy possessed an economy in which industrial labor played a key role and constituted a substantial part of the population. Southern Italy was agrarian and backward, with a large percentage of exploited peasants and only a small percentage of industrial workers.

But, very significantly, Tarrow now believes that these "structural" expectations are probably too "macro" to serve as the basis of social explanation. Instead, he favors the importance of looking at the dynamics of social processes and the specific causal mechanisms that can be discovered in particular social-historical settings. This means looking for causal factors that work at a more strategic and meso level. In terms of the southern Italian PCI outcome that he was interested in explaining thirty years ago -- he now believes that the causal mechanism of "brokerage" would have shed much more light on the political outcomes that were of interest in Italy. (This is the heart of the approach that he takes, along with Doug McAdam and Chuck Tilly, in Dynamics of Contention.)

This finding doesn't invalidate the heuristic of paired comparisons. But it probably does invalidate the expectation that we might discover large "structure-structure" patterns of causation through such comparisons. Instead, what the method facilitates is a more focused research effort on the part of the comparativist, in the context of which he/she can search out the lower-level causal mechanisms and processes that are at work in the various settings under study.

Social science history and historical social science

I talked recently with Tom Sugrue about his approach to historical research, and he had quite a few interesting things to say. (Tom is professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. The interview is posted on YouTube.) One topic we discussed was the relationship between historical research and social science research -- especially those areas of social science research that take history seriously. Tom's central observation is that historians pay very close attention to the empirical and historical data that they work with -- the surprises and gritty texture that will be encountered in the archives. But historians sometimes lose track of the larger questions that ought to give focus to their work. This is where historical social science can be helpful; the social scientists are interested in large questions such as power, class, race, or economic structure. But the social scientists have their own symmetrical weakness -- they often give too little attention to the empirical details of the cases or events they include in their analysis. So Tom seems to be saying that history and social science can both contribute most strongly when the macro-disciplines work together, bringing theoretical vision and factual specificity into play.

This contrast has come up quite a bit in the past twenty-five years. Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol offered social science theories of the causes of large political upheavals such as dictatorship and revolution. Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World was pathbreaking in the way it defined the intellectual challenge of explaining fascism and dictatorship. In Skocpol's important book States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China she offered a comparative treatment of the Russian, French, and Chinese Revolutions, in an effort to tease out the social causes that brought about successful revolutions in these cases. This is an important and compelling question for social scientists, and Skocpol's analysis has been highly influential. But historians of each of those revolutions often complained that her treatment wasn't historical enough: it wasn't based on her own archival work, it was more abstract than a good history of the French Revolution would be, and it was offered as an effort to arrive a some causal generalizations -- rather than an account of this one specific messy historical complexity. So there was a macro-disciplinary difference of perspective between the comparative historical sociologists (Moore, Skocpol, Goldstone) and the historians.

I am inclined to think that the tension between the two disciplines is inherent and healthy; the historians and the comparative sociologists are trying to accomplish fairly different intellectual tasks. The comparative sociologist is looking for some sort of causal or structural similarity across cases -- instances of dictatorship, revolution, or labor union -- and necessarily reduces the historical complexity of the cases to an analytical framework. This means putting aside much of the messy complexity of the actual cases -- the particular strategies used by the Chinese Communist Party in a base area, the rhetoric of competition between the Parisian parties in 1790, the accidents of history that intruded into the particular cases. The historian, on the other hand, is primarily interested in the particulars. How did the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans proceed in this city in this time period?

We might push the question a little bit deeper and ask, what resources can the social sciences offer working historians? One part of the answer is conceptual: social scientists have framed a number of conceptual frameworks in terms of which to characterize and interrogate historical reality. Marx's theory of class, Durkheim's theory of anomie, Tocqueville's highlighting of civic associations -- these are all instances of an effort by a social theorist to formulate a concept and a set of correlative theories in terms of which to analyze the historically given. Second, social theorists devote much of their intellectual energy to discovering and analyzing common social mechanisms -- free-rider problems, class conflict, collective action, ethnic violence. Historians can benefit by borrowing from each of these areas of knowledge. And third, some people think that social scientists aim to discover laws or regularities that govern social phenomena. If this were so, then the task of the historian would be very simple: go through the relevant social science literature, dredge up the pertinent laws, and explain the particular in terms of the workings of the laws. Unfortunately, no such laws exist; there are no "laws of motion" of modern society. So the historian's intuition -- that every historical event has its own individuality -- is born out. At the same time, the social sciences can provide concepts and mechanisms on the basis of which the historian can do a better job of formulating and explaining the historical event of interest.

As Tom Sugrue says in the interview, both these perspectives benefit from deep immersion in the findings and research efforts of the other. But I'm inclined to think that they are not simply different ends of a spectrum. Rather, they are different kinds of intellectual activity, and the criteria of success are different as well.