Building Empirical Typologies With QCA: Towards a Classification of Media Systems

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives in Political Communication Research

Abstract

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is a methodological approach that recently has gained recognition in the social sciences for analyzing how sets of conditions can explain an outcome. Less well-developed and so far rarely applied in media and communication research is the use of QCA for developing typologies. The contribution of this paper is twofold: we demonstrate that QCA is a feasible and intuitive strategy to build empirical typologies and we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology drawing on the framework developed by Hallin and Mancini (2004. Our analysis illustrates three advantages of QCA for building typologies: First, it provides a systematic mechanism for producing parsimonious and precise types by reducing the number of conditions involved via logical minimization. Second, QCA fosters a case-oriented interpretation of results and identifies systematic patterns across cases, thus combining the strengths of quantitative and qualitative methods. Third, QCA provides information about how well each case is represented by a certain type and thus helps to identify border cases that share characteristics of different types. This adds to the literature on innovative methods in comparative research and ways to combine quantitative and qualitative research.

Keywords: qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), typologies, methodology, media systems, international & comparative

Authors

• Florin Buechel, U of Zurich

• Edda Humprecht, U of Zurich - IPMZ

• Laia Castro Herrero, U of Fribourg

• Sven Engesser, U of Zurich

• Michael Brueggemann, U of Zurich