Beyond Mill: Why Cross-Case Qualitative Causal Inference Is Weak, and Why We Should Still Compare

Abstract

ions. They inveighed against equating particular practices or institutions that have superficial similarities, yet actually work in profoundly different ways. Sartori’s taxonomical metaphor, with its injunction against comparing across genera, may have seemed like a prudent corrective to problematic scholarly trends in 1970, yet appears too confining for today’s world. (It Qualitative and Multi-Method Research | 33 Qualitative and Multi-Method Research 2018, Vol. 16, No. 1 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2562173 would seem odd to the modern biologists who compare DNA, evolutionary patterns, and more across kingdoms, let alone across lower taxonomic ranks.) His skepticism that any category might travel effectively from “the West” to “Africa or South-East Asia,” now seems antiquated. Both Sartori and LaPalombara questioned whether political “participation” could happen in communist regimes, yet certain forms of participation, including grassroots protests, are frequent in today’s China. While Sartori objected to using the term “mobilization” in democracies, today it is well-accepted that individuals do not always engage in democratic political action purely on their own initiative, but rather are driven to act by friends, organizations, inspiring leaders, and so forth. One can simultaneously note this and also bear in mind a vital distinction in kind between this and the type of ruling party orchestration that, in autocracies, compels people to cast ballots in sham elections and the like. The key point here is that we can investigate related phenomena across contrasting political systems, without losing sight of nuances, frictions, and the possibility that they have radically different meanings. Indeed, assessing conceptual fit with care and attention to context is a significant purpose and contribution of comparative work. It is by doing so that we guard against thoughtlessly and misleadingly assimilating unlike things, a danger that Sartori was right to warn against. Making the case for some degree of comparability across highly dissimilar systems is a crucial part of an investigator’s task in such research. A general approach is to argue that an area of politics exists that follows its own distinct rules and patterns, perhaps somewhat isolated from other aspects of the political system, or at least not wholly reducible to it. Zhang, for example, does this in her analysis of the politics of urban preservation, examining how different kinds of governmental fragmentation in Beijing, Chicago, and Paris dictate which historical buildings are protected and which are bulldozed (2013). Another example is Thomas J. Christensen’s Useful Adversaries, which remarkably compares the United States and China from 1947–1958. He argues that in both countries, leaders stoked low-level conflicts in order to rally the public for long-term security strategies, and that such frictions can spiral into unwanted wars, such as the Korean War (1996). By their nature, comparisons among highly dissimilar political systems practically require the researcher to confront deep conceptual issues—and qualitative research has an important role to play in so doing. If, as Gary Goertz writes, “a concept involves a theoretical and empirical analysis of the object or phenomenon referred to by the word,” it is natural that those working at and around conceptual boundaries will carry out much analytical work (2006, 4). Often the posing of the comparison itself requires or stimulates such efforts in at least two different forms. Framing the Comparison and Evaluating Fit In designing a cross-national comparative project, the researcher identifies what is to be compared. He or she establishes a universe of relevant cases. Much methodological advice addresses the question of how to select cases once that universe has been defined, but the prior step may be more a matter of creative perceptiveness than of following rules and prescriptions. In Zhang’s book, for example, the mere juxtaposition of Beijing with, say, Chicago is itself a startling and intellectually disruptive act for readers accustomed to thinking of these places in completely different theoretical contexts. Particularly when considering widely varying political systems, these “scope” decisions may require substantial research and can be consequential contributions in themselves. As with framing processes more generally, these decisions create an “interpretive schemata that simplifies and condenses the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions” (Snow and Benford 1992, 137). Having done this, the researcher scrutinizes the crucial attributes that include certain cases in a common set and exclude others. These characteristics, on which so much hinges, require ongoing evaluation in relation to the purpose and justification for the comparison. Concept Development Comparison across dissimilar systems often provides opportunities for conceptual innovation and development even as it poses risks of “stretching.” Wide-reaching comparisons can, of course, draw on existing conceptual definitions, but I argue that they are relatively more likely to create opportunities for new departures. This need not, and should not, take the form of haphazardly extending concepts to places where they do not fit. Rather, it can mean defining or discovering categories of empirical phenomena that differ from what is already known and accepted—whether or not they are so novel as to constitute “unidentified political objects” (Jourde 2009, 201). These might be tangible, such as a particular type of organizational structure, or intangible, such as a kind of dynamic within a social movement. Tsai’s comparison of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in localities in India 34 | Problems and Possibilities of Comparison Across Regime Types and China, for instance, extends the usually domesticcentered concept of state-society relations to encompass transnational migrants and diasporic communities. Such possibilities for innovation should be recognized as an important part of what cross-system comparison accomplishes. (The reader will note a kinship with the “casing” process discussed by Soss in this symposium, and to Htun and Jensenius’s points on conceptual development.) Innovations through framing and concept development are separate things and need not co-occur in the same project, yet the two are related to one another. As we shift focus away from the familiar and towards less-similar cases, our attention is drawn to conceptual aspects of the cases that went unnoticed or seemed unimportant in other perspectives. (“Unlike the other cases, Indonesia never had A and instead had B, yet it is similar to the others in terms of C, and I wonder if that operates through the same mechanism ...”). At the same time, spotlighting different features of the concepts may catalyze efforts to find related, heretofore unexamined, cases that share those features. (“I wonder if Malaysia has something like that ...”). Comparing Ultra-local State-sponsored Organizations in China and Taiwan Taiwan’s period of authoritarian rule under the Nationalist Party (KMT) from 1945 to the early 1990s was akin in various ways to authoritarian China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A number of most-similar systems studies have compared the two.2 Since Taiwan’s democratization, however, the two have diverged politically. Even as the opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait retain cultural, social, and linguistic commonalities, present-day comparisons now present special challenges, as well as opportunities. A project of mine that examined state-society interactions at the very most local level of cities in China and Taiwan illustrates the kind of work entailed in navigating such challenges and opportunities. I sought to explain ways in which citizens looked upon and interacted with government-structured neighborhood organizations, which bring state power and authority into the ultra-local sphere of residential communities. I compared specific institutions in (mainly) the capitals, Beijing and Taipei. In the former, my subject was the official neighborhood organizations, known as Residents’ 2 I review such comparisons in “China–Taiwan Comparisons: Still Promising Though Not ‘Ideal’,” Harvard Workshop on Chinese Politics, February 23, 2018, http://cnpoliticsworkinggroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Ben-Read_China-Taiwan-Comparisons.pdf 3 In China and Taiwan alike, these organizations also have rural counterparts. 4 One article compares Shanghai’s RCs to Los Angeles’s neighborhood councils. This results in some astute observations, but mainly a catalog of structural contrasts (Chen, Cooper, and Sun 2009). Committees (RCs; jumin weiyuanhui), that the Chinese state has maintained since the early 1950s. In the latter, it was the state-sponsored neighborhood offices (li bangongchu) that date to the KMT’s arrival in the mid-1940s. What was the basis for comparing these? They have a number of things in common. Both are part of a nationwide network that covers all urban space.3 While organizational details vary somewhat by locality, they are mandated in national law and correspond to a unified template. A neighborhood has no choice whether or not to have such an office. In both countries, they handle a very wide range of responsibilities. They serve as what might be called all-purpose contact points for state agencies at the community level, for instance helping the welfare bureaucracy to determine households’ eligibility for assistance programs by drawing on their local knowledge of residents’ circumstances. They also field a seemingly endless variety of queries and demands from their constituents. The similarly statist structure in which they are embedded facilitates the comparison. Comparisons to more liberal settings are harder.4 Taiwan’s institutions certainly had significant differences from