Quantification and Critical Junctures: Evaluating New Quantitative Studies

• In Event: Critical Junctures: Juxtaposing Methods, Triangulating among Divergent Findings

Abstract

This paper considers the contributions of the recent literature on quantitative history to the assessment of claims about critical junctures and historical legacies, and its implications for qualitative research on critical junctures. It initially shows that, even though the literature on quantitative history does not commonly use the terminology of the critical juncture framework, it shares an interest in distant causes and persistent effects, and hence is relevant to researchers working on critical junctures. Thereafter, the paper focuses on substantive research on quantitative history, and discusses the methods of causal inference used in this literature. It shows that this literature tests arguments about causal effects and causal mechanisms, and has supplemented quantitative tests with various qualitative diagnostics that draw on different kinds of causal process observations. The contributions of quantitative history are important and should be recognized. However, the view presented in this literature that researchers face a methodological choice between using either qualitative or quantitative methods, and that quantitative research is always preferable to qualitative research, is mistaken. Rather, quantitative history would benefit from using qualitative tools in a more self-conscious and thorough manner. Moreover, the potential of qualitative research is not exhausted by its use in qualitative diagnostics to quantitative tests.

Author

• Gerardo L. Munck, University of Southern California