This chapter lays out the study’s research design. The design aims to enhance cycles of silence theory’s generalizability at two levels. At a macro level, the goal is to increase the potential that, contingent on local factors, the theory applies to as many of the communities facing criminal group violence as possible. It does so by drawing on logic derived from human social psychological dynamics, leveraging a wide range of existing datasets including a global survey of 109,000 citizens, and studying communities both the Global North (Baltimore, Maryland) and Global South (Lagos, Nigeria). At a micro level, the design combines cross-national data with original surveys as well as interviews and first- hand observations in Baltimore and Lagos. This multimethod approach improves the likelihood that the findings from the surveys and interviews in Baltimore and Lagos accurately reflect cooperation dynamics in the cities. Finally, the chapter provides definitions for key terms related to the study’s main actors – criminal groups, police, and citizens – and the main outcome of citizen cooperation with the police.

Social and behavioral researchers often draw on archival data – data collected by an entity other than the research team – to conduct scientific inquiry. Researchers typically seek to make claims about measured variables that extend beyond the measures themselves, such as interpreting a measure as representing an unobservable theoretical construct. Though researchers using archival data encounter many issues, this chapter focuses on two that have received less attention. The first concerns how researchers should justify the interpretations and uses they attach to archival measures. The second concerns how to justify generalizing findings. This chapter provides a framework to help researchers address these issues by drawing on contemporary validity theory in education and psychology as well as theory regarding causal mechanisms from philosophy and sociology. These concepts are illustrated using multiple examples from published studies.

This chapter provides an accessible introduction to experimental methods for social and behavioral scientists. We cover the process of experimentation from generating hypotheses through to statistical analyses. The chapter discusses classical issues (e.g., experimental design, selecting appropriate samples) but also more recent developments that have attracted the attention of experimental researchers. These issues include replication, preregistration, online samples, and power analyses. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of experimental methods. We conclude by noting that, for many research questions, experimental methods provide the strongest test of hypothesized causal relationships. Furthermore, well-designed experiments can elicit the same mental processes as in the real world; this typically makes them generalizable to new people and real-life situations.

In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

Replication is an important tool used to test and develop scientific theories. Areas of biomedical and psychological research have experienced a replication crisis, in which many published findings failed to replicate. Following this, many other scientific disciplines have been interested in the robustness of their own findings. This chapter examines replication in primate cognitive studies. First, it discusses the frequency and success of replication studies in primate cognition and explores the challenges researchers face when designing and interpreting replication studies across the wide range of research designs used across the field. Next, it discusses the type of research that can probe the robustness of published findings, especially when replication studies are difficult to perform. The chapter concludes with a discussion of different roles that replication can have in primate cognition research.

It is likely that comparative psychologists, animal learning researchers, and behavior analysts agree with the general tenets of a behavior systems framework — that behavior is organized, that learning depends on a set of starting conditions that consist of the past and present state of an animal (including its evolutionary history), and that learning is influenced by the physical characteristics of the environments in which it is studied. Despite this agreement, a behavior systems framework is typically used to explain anomalous results rather than serve as the theoretical foundation for testing the generality of constructs and phenomena in the study of animal learning. In this chapter, we illustrate how a behavior systems framework, with its emphasis on situating animal learning and behavior in a functional context and measuring multiple responses, can be used in pursuit of that goal.

Chapter 5 delves into three additional cases of treaty interpretation by the human rights treaty bodies. The aim of the chapter is to probe the plausibility of the TLC concept across the human rights regime. I use insights and findings gathered from the drafting process of GC No. 15 to articulate a typology that distinguishes the treaty bodies by their likelihood to need external input when drafting GCs. Drawing on a combination of data – documents and existing scholarship, as well as interviews and personal observations – the case studies ultimately demonstrate the TLC concept to be applicable to drafting processes in other treaty bodies, even where their formation is less likely.

To what extent can an ethnographic sensibility enhance comparison? We argue that approaching comparison with an ethnographic sensibility – that is, being sensitive to how informants make sense of their worlds and incorporating meaning into our analyses – can strengthen comparative qualitative research. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility would enhance the quality of scholarly arguments by incorporating the processes through which actors ascribe meanings to their lived experiences and the political processes in which they are enmeshed. Because social science arguments often involve accounts of individual actors’ interests, ideas, or impressions, it is imperative to place such cognitive arguments in a broader cultural context. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility requires attention not only to that context but also to the political and social meanings which make that context intelligible. We elaborate these arguments through the lens of two comparative ethnographic works: a study of political mobilization in Bolivia and Mexico and a study of vigilantism in two South African townships.

In an interview with Lisa Wedeen, one of the contemporary comparative political scientists whose work most consistently speaks to both political science and interdisciplinary audiences, the editors ask Wedeen to reflect on the role that comparison has played in her work. Wedeen is the author of three groundbreaking monographs on seemingly single cases – two on Syria and one on Yemen. Yet, in the course of the interview, it becomes apparent how profoundly comparative Wedeen’s work is. She discusses her comparison of “exemplary events” in her field sites as a method through which to draw broad lessons about politics from apparent ephemera. She discusses the comparisons she makes between ethnographic insights and political theory to tack back and forth between empirical and theoretical material with the goal of developing new ways to think about politics. And she discusses the ways in which these comparative practices make her work not just an empirical practice but also a political practice – one that makes the work of a comparative political scientist not just a career but a vocation.

In the final empirical chapter, I push beyond Senegal to look broadly across West Africa to assess the generalizability of my findings. Senegal is not the only West African state to display remarkable subnational variation in exposure to precolonial statehood nor to have recently undertaken decentralization reforms. I extend my coding of precolonial kingdoms to the subregion and match it to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Afrobarometer public opinion surveys to test the theory's generalizability. I find that areas of West Africa that were exposed to precolonial states have seen bigger gains in locally delivered public goods and that Afrobarometer respondents in these areas are more positive about their local governments and democratic practice than their counterparts in historically acephalous zones. While my theory is built around the specific legacies of precolonial statehood, the chapter's second half move beyond Africa to show the broader analytic leverage of the theory’s twin mechanisms of shared social identification and social network ties for Comparative Politics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of scope conditions for the argument.

Is my theory generalizable to other cases of British and Spanish colonial rule beyond India? I use historical data to show that the mechanisms of land and natural resource extraction and lower development seen in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh in India are found in other cases. The British used indirect rule in the "frontier" areas in Pakistan and Myanmar, which created structural conditions for insurgency. Within Pakistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban insurgency since the mid-2000s in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) has occurred in areas of erstwhile British indirect rule. In Myanmar, there have been multiple ethnic secessionist insurgencies in the periphery that were frontier areas of indirect rule. My theory can also be generalized to Spanish colonialism in Latin America. I briefly describe two cases of Spanish colonial land tenure institutions creating land inequalities and leftist insurgency, one is the case of Spanish rule in Mexico, which created conditions for the Zapatista insurgency, and another case is of Spanish and then American rule in the Philippines that resulted in the New People’s Army (NPA) insurgency.

This chapter provides an overview of convenience sampling in political science experimental research.We first define convenience sampling and track its use in political science research.Next, we focus on the use of three sample types: undergraduate convenience samples, crowdsourced convenience samples, and other types such as social media and non-student convenience sample samples.We review empirical research on the potential issues with each convenience sample type, along with best practices that can be used to address those issues.Overall, we conclude that while there are justified concerns that scholars should be aware of when using convenience samples, much of the empirical research suggests that they provide valid results for experimental treatment effects that reliably replicate across more representative probability samples.