This chapter describes: the creation of the ICC; its main features (such as its jurisdiction and its rules for selecting cases); opposition and criticisms; and a brief assessment of its work, including its controversial and sometimes disappointing early efforts, and the challenges that the Court confronts. The chapter discusses the Court’s jurisdiction – including personal and territorial jurisdiction, temporal jurisdiction, and subject matter jurisdiction. It discusses the ‘trigger mechanisms’: State Party referrals (including self-referrals), Security Council referrals, and initiation by the Prosecutor. It explains preliminary examination, investigation, and prosecution, as well as the selection criteria of admissibility (complementarity and gravity), and the interests of justice. It discusses opposition to the ICC, including the criticisms from the United States and the African Union, as well as key developments, such as US attacks on the ICC and threats of withdrawal from the African Union. The chapter reviews the Court’s record, including problems of collapsed cases, slow proceedings, the early focus on Africa, and accusations of selectivity and bias, as well as recent indications of progress.

Chapter 7 shows how RIO can facilitate algorithmic case selection. We outline how algorithms can be used to select cases for in-depth analysis and provide two empirical analyses to illustrate how RIO facilitates a deeper understanding of how cases relate to one another within the model space, and how they align with the theoretical motivations for different case selection strategies.

In this chapter, we describe the main elements of our empirical design for studying the refugee crisis. In the first part of the chapter, we describe our case selection, which involves two steps. In the first step, we classify EU member states into five main types: frontline, transit, open destination, closed destination, and bystander states. In the second step, within selected countries, but also at the EU level, we study the crisis by breaking it down into key policymaking episodes. The policymaking episodes we have chosen involve legislative acts as well as administrative decisions and novel practices by state institutions. In the second part of the chapter, we expand upon the empirical approaches we employ for studying the crisis. Our book draws upon a variety of original datasets involving various methods of data collection. While many of these are mixed throughout the book, the central dataset we rely on uses policy process analysis (PPA), an original method for capturing the policymaking and politics surrounding policy debates using media data, which we describe more thoroughly in this chapter.

We turn to the problem of choosing between going “wide” and going “deep”: between seeking a little bit of information on a large number of cases versus studying a smaller number of cases intensively. We outline a simulation-based approach to identify the optimal mix of breadth and depth. Simulations suggest that going deep is especially valuable where confounding is a concern, for queries about causal pathways, and where models embed strong beliefs about causal effects. We also find that there are diminishing marginal returns to each strategy and that depth often provides the greatest gains when we have cross-case evidence on only a modest number of cases.

Chapter 6 intends to familiarize the reader with the empirical material that is used in the book. The chapter argues that East Asia’s diversity of autocratic experiences since the end of World War II makes it a well-suited testing ground for the theoretical expectation of the two logics of autocratic rule. It proposes that “casing” is an active endeavor to create the units of analysis. As such, it discusses the spatiotemporal coverage of the empirical analysis and identifies forty-five autocratic regime episodes in thirteen East Asian countries. The countries that are covered are Cambodia, PR China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, North Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Lastly, the chapter provides an overview of the sources for the Autocratic Regimes in East Asia (AREA) dataset, highlighting the methodological procedure of the book to combine available quantitative indicators with qualitative assessments and condense this information into individual case narratives.

In this chapter, I offer an original analytical framework for what I call recognition conflicts. I propose a definition and a typology that can help identify these conflicts beyond the specific geographical and temporal boundaries of my empirical cases. The second part of the chapter is intended as a methodological and conceptual framework to orient the reader throughout the remainder of the book. I provide a rationale for the country case selection, a description of methods used and my methodological approaches, and a brief discussion of key concepts and terminology.

In the past two decades, several democracies have slipped into democratic recession. Faced with economic or security crises, democratically elected executives in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa have used their popularity to push for legislation – particularly constitutional amendments – that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and erodes political rights and civil liberties. Across the world, these heads of government have found ways to subvert democratic norms while simultaneously maintaining a democratic façade. Using and abusing elections and institutional reform, they are turning new and old democracies alike into competitive authoritarian regimes.

Chapter 6 introduces a case-based approach to exploratory research. Here, a tight focus on particular case or a small number of cases allows for a detailed but preliminary exploration of phenomena. For this purpose, we lay out techniques of case selection where the analysis is exploratory rather than confirmatory. These techniques may be categorized as (a) extreme, (b) index, (c) deviant, (d) most-similar, or (e) diverse.

Chapter 5 – Heuristics and Positions: A Framework for Analysing Discourses of Humanisation – discusses what is necessary from a methodological perspective to analyse the appearance of the individual human being in global politics. To this end, the chapter develops an interpretative methodology and presents in more detail the abductive research logic and the method employed in the case studies. The book draws on positioning analysis and introduces it to thetoolbox of IR scholars. The chapter also outlines the research design and its operationalisation for the case studies. The analytical framework allows overcoming methodological individualism by studying the appearance of the individual human being in global politics instead of studying individual human beings. In doing so, the individual human being is made analytically accessible for scholars of global politics.

Chapter 3 lays out the book’s research strategy for testing its theory. Since talking to citizens directly is the best way to see how foreign actors influence perceptions of election credibility, Bush and Prather rely heavily on evidence from nationally representative surveys that were conducted for this project, although they also rely on other forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence. In total, they conducted ten large-scale surveys across elections in three countries at different levels of democracy. Specifically, Bush and Prather studied citizens’ perceptions of the 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections in Tunisia (a transitional democracy), the 2016, 2018, and 2020 general elections in the United States (a consolidated democracy), and the 2018 first-round and second-round presidential elections in Georgia (a partial democracy). This chapter describes the book’s survey methodology, including its approach to embedding experimental vignettes designed to identify the effects of foreign actors, discusses case selection, and provides background information on each of the cases.

This chapter elaborates Bayesian information-theoretic principles for optimal case selection and practical rules of thumb for real-world contexts.

Pavone analyzes how our evolving understanding of case-based causal inference via process-tracing should alter how we select cases for comparative inquiry. The chapter explicates perhaps the most influential and widely used means to conduct qualitative research involving two or more cases: Mill’s methods of agreement and difference. It then argues that the traditional use of Millian methods of case selection can lead us to treat cases as static units to be synchronically compared rather than as social processes unfolding over time. As a result, Millian methods risk prematurely rejecting and otherwise overlooking (1) ordered causal processes, (2) paced causal processes, and (3) equifinality, or the presence of multiple pathways that produce the same outcome. To address these issues, the chapter develops a set of recommendations to ensure the alignment of Millian methods of case selection with within-case sequential analysis.

Political scientist Cammett considers the use of positive deviant cases – examples of sustained high performance in a context in which good results are uncommon – to identify and disentangle causal complexity and understand the role of context. Although the consensus view on the role of deviant cases is that they are most useful for exploratory purposes or discovery and theory building, Cammett suggests they can also generate insights into the identification and operation of causal mechanisms. She writes that “analyses of positive deviant cases among a field of otherwise similar cases that operate in the same context … can be a valuable way to identify potential explanatory variables for exceptional performance.” The hypothesized explanatory variables can then be incorporated in subsequent quantitative or qualitative studies in order to evaluate their effects across a broader range of observations. The chapter discusses how to approach selection of positive deviant cases systematically and then works through a real example.

Chapter 2 covers theory and methodology. In the theory section, I elaborate on the conventional wisdom about authoritarian corruption control, consider several alternative explanations, and then present my argument in full. In the methodology section, I develop my proposed scoring system for anti-corruption efforts, describe how political factors such as discretionary power are assessed, defend my case selection, and give a brief overview of the sources used.

Despite the tremendous renaissance of comparative constitutional law, the comparative aspect of the enterprise, as a method and a project, remains under-theorized and imprecise. Methodological self-awareness has not been one of the field’s strengths. In comparative constitutional law (and Constitutionalism in Context more generally) the term “comparative” is often used indiscriminately to describe what, in fact, are several different types of scholarship, each with its own meanings, aims and purposes. What is more, various vocational, jurisprudential, academic, and scientific stakeholders involved in practicing the art of constitutional comparison. This chapter will explore the various types, aims and methodologies deployed in exploring constitutional phenomena comparatively across time and space. In so doing, it will identify some gaps in the field’s contemporary methodological matrix and suggest ways in which these deficiencies may be addressed and overcome.

This last, consolidating chapter has four goals. The first is consolidation: we specify appropriate case selection strategies for research using QCA and summarize an integrated protocol for analyzing set relations in an iterative manner, which bases inferences on cross-case patterns, knowledge of individual cases, and external knowledge. This protocol follows three main steps both for necessary and for sufficient conditions: determining empirical consistency, empirical importance, and substantive importance. The second goal is to broaden the perspective: we discuss the diverse variants, uses, and analytic goals of QCA in different research designs. We argue that for deriving valid inferences with QCA, it is important to coherently choose tools in line with analytic approaches. Third, we summarize and update good practices for conducting QCA and presenting and visualizing its results. Lastly, we map exciting developments that are likely to shape the field in the foreseeable future, including a summary of prominent software functionality.

Learning goals:

- Consolidated knowledge of the analytic protocol of QCA.

- Overview of different uses of QCA, their analytic goals and corresponding tools.

- Overview of recommendations for good practice and transparency before, during, and after the analytic moment.

- Outlook of possible developments in the field.

What does it mean to advance women’s status and well-being? And how should we think about the role of the state in bringing about that advancement? Our work analyzes the approach and role of the state in promoting women’s empowerment, drawing on large-N country-level data and in-depth case studies of state action in the United States, Norway, and Japan. Our three country cases vary greatly in terms of the state’s approach to women’s rights; we picked them because we believe them to be extreme examples of how state action is driven by different visions of what women’s empowerment is about. Conducting fieldwork in these different contexts allows us to study some of the variation in people’s views of both state action and empowerment. It sharpens our awareness of important assumptions that underlie studies of empowerment. It also helps us determine the right questions to ask. To the extent that we study causal relationships, we do so based on large-N data within cases, not across them. And rather than assume that the same causal patterns apply across cases, we draw on our fieldwork to better understand why the same policies produce vastly different effects in different contexts. This chapter is a reflection on some of the goals of comparative studies that are unrelated to drawing causal inferences, and how to think about research design and case selection to achieve these goals.

The chapter discusses the study's conceptual and methodological foundation.