Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T12:02:03.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Qualitative research methods for institutional analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

David Skarbek*
Affiliation:
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

How can economists use qualitative evidence – such as archival materials, interviews, and ethnography – to study institutions? While applied economists typically rely on quantitative evidence and statistical estimation, many important aspects of institutions and institutional change appear in the form of qualitative evidence. This raises the question if, and how, social scientists trained in quantitative methods can exploit and analyze this evidence. This paper discusses two qualitative research methods that are both commonly used outside of economics: comparative case studies and process tracing. Drawing on existing research about crime and political revolutions, it discusses these two methods and how to implement them to improve institutional analysis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abadie, A., Diamond, A. and Hainmueller, J. (2010), ‘Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California's Tobacco Control Program’, Journal of the American statistical Association, 105(490): 493505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abadie, A., Diamond, A. and Hainmueller, J. (2015), ‘Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method’, American Journal of Political Science, 59(2): 495510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abbott, A. D. (2004), Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Bateman, D. A. and Teele, D. L. (2019), ‘A Developmental Approach to Historical Causal Inference’, Public Choice. doi: 10.1007/s11127-019-00713-4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, R. H., Greif, A., Levi, M., Rosenthal, J.-L. and Weingast, B. R. (1998), Analytic Narratives, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Beach, D. (2016), ‘It's All About Mechanisms – What Process-Tracing Case Studies Should be Tracing’, New Political Economy, 21(5): 463472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, A. (2010), ‘Process Tracing and Causal Inference’, in Brady, H.E. and Collier, D. (eds), Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. 2nd edn.Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 207219.Google Scholar
Bennett, A. and Checkel, J. T. (2015), ‘Process Tracing: From Philosophical Roots to Best Practices’, in Bennett, A. and Checkel, J.T. (eds), Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 337.Google Scholar
Boettke, P. J., Coyne, C. J. and Leeson, P. T. (2013), ‘Comparative Historical Political economy’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 9(3): 285301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boettke, P. J., Lemke, J. S. and Palagashvili, L. (2016), ‘Re-evaluating Community Policing in a Polycentric System’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 12(2): 305325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Card, D. (1990), ‘The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market’, ILR Review, 43(2): 245257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collier, D. (2011), ‘Understanding Process Tracing’, PS: Political Science & Politics, 44(4): 823830.Google Scholar
Coppedge, M. (1999), ‘Thickening Thin Concepts and Theories: Combining Large n and Small in Comparative Politics’, Comparative Politics, 31(4): 465476CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deaton, A. and Cartwright, N. (2018), ‘Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials’, Social Science & Medicine, 210: 221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Draca, M., Machin, S. and Witt, R. (2011), ‘Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime, and the July 2005 Terror Attacks’, American Economic Review, 101(5): 21572181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falleti, T. G. (2016), ‘Process Tracing of Extensive and Intensive Processes’, New Political Economy, 21(5): 455462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freire, D. (2018), ‘Evaluating the Effect of Homicide Prevention Strategies in Sao Paulo, Brazil: A Synthetic Control Approach’, Latin American Research Review, 53(2). 231249CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gailmard, S. (2019), ‘Game Theory and the Study of American Political Development’, Public Choice. doi:10.1007/s11127-019-00705-4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerring, J. (2012), Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gerring, J. (2017), Case Study Research: Principles and Practices, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Giraudy, A., Moncada, E. and Snyder, R. (2019), Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greif, A. (2006), Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons From Medieval Trade, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greif, A. and Kingston, C. (2011), ‘Institutions: Rules or Equilibria?’, in Schofield, N. and Caballero, G. (eds), Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy and Voting. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 1343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, G., Keohane, R. O. and Verba, S. (1994), Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirzner, I. M. (2009), The Economic Point of View, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc.Google Scholar
Klick, J. and Tabarrok, A. (2005), ‘Using Terror Alert Levels to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime’, The Journal of Law and Economics, 48(1): 267279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuran, T. (2012), The Long Divergence: How Islamic law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeson, P. T. (2007), ‘An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization’, Journal of political economy, 115(6): 10491094.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeson, P. T. (2009a), ‘The Calculus of Piratical Consent: The Myth of the Myth of Social Contract’, Public Choice, 139(3–4): 443459.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeson, P. T. (2009b), The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeson, P. T. (2010), ‘Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 76(3): 497510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, J. S. (2008), ‘Counterfactuals and Case Studies’, in Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M., Brady, Henry E., and Collier, David (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 627644.Google Scholar
Lorentzen, P., Fravel, M. T. and Paine, J. (2017), ‘Qualitative Investigation of Theoretical Models: The Value of Process Tracing’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 29(3): 467491.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyall, J., Blair, G. and Imai, K. (2013), ‘Explaining Support for Combatants During Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan’, American Political Science Review, 107(4): 679705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, J. (2010), ‘After KKV: The New Methodology of Qualitative Research’, World Politics, 62(1): 120147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCloskey, D. N. (2016), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Moskos, P. (2008), Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Munger, M. C. (2010), ‘Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: Elinor Ostrom and the Diversity of Institutions’, Public Choice, 143(3): 263268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E. (2005), Understanding Institutional Diversity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ostrom, E. and Smith, D. C. (1976), ‘On the Fate of ‘Lilliputs’ in Metropolitan Policing’, Public Administration Review, 36(2): 192200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E., Parks, R. B. and Whitaker, G. P. (1978), Patterns of Metropolitan Policing, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Poteete, A. R., Janssen, M. A. and Ostrom, E. (2010), Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, W. and Ullian, J. S. U. (1978), The Web of Belief, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Rodrik, D. (2015), Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, Oxford, UK: WW Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Ruhm, C. J. (2019), ‘Shackling the Identification Police?’, Southern Economic Journal, 85(4): 10161026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seawright, J. (2016), Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shirley, M. M. (2013), ‘Measuring Institutions: How to be Precise Though Vague’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 9(1): 3133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skarbek, D. (2011), ‘Governance and Prison Gangs’, American Political Science Review, 105(4): 702716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skarbek, D. (2014), The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skarbek, D. (2016), ‘Covenants Without the Sword? Comparing Prison Self-Governance Globally’, American Political Science Review, 110(4): 845862.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skocpol, T. (1979), States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, C. (1984), Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Trampusch, C. and Palier, B. (2016), ‘Between x and y: How Process Tracing Contributes to Opening the Black Box of Causality’, New Political Economy, 21(5): 437454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voigt, S. (2013), ‘How (not) to Measure Institutions’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 9(1): 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar