Selecting Cases in Cross‐National Political Research

Abstract

Four specific problems are discussed that relate to selecting comparable cases in cross‐national political research. First, to manage the so‐called Galton's problem, which is about the assumption of autonomous units, two strategies are discussed. The one is to abandon the assumption and study the mechanisms of diffusion, the second is to choose cases for comparison which can be assumed to have influenced each other to a minor extent only. Second, it is suggested that the method of paired comparisons be applied more than before to minimize the ‘many variables, small N problem’ (Arend Lijphart). Third, the tendency of the comparable cases strategy to over‐determine the dependent phenomenon throws an unfavourable light on binary comparisons, which are much too popular in comparative political science. Finally, the task of explaining by means of variances in several independent variables the variance in one dependent variable requires the use of several and not only one set of cases.