Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set of tactics for abductive analysis that can be applied for qualitative analysis. Our approach applies Timmermans and Tavory's ( Timmermans and Tavory 2012 ; Tavory and Timmermans 2014 ) three stages of abduction in three steps for qualitative (secondary) analysis: Generating an Abductive Codebook, Abductive Data Reduction through Code Equations, and In-Depth Abductive Qualitative Analysis. A key contribution of our article is the development of “code equations”—defined as the combination of codes to operationalize phenomena that span individual codes. Code equations are an important resource for abduction and other qualitative approaches that leverage qualitative data to build theory.
This article studies the nationalisation of local party systems in Belgian regions across eight electoral cycles (1976-2018). Our research design assesses the relevance of Rokkan's structural approach of nationalisation while testing the effect of conjunctural electoral factors. Our empirical results highlight the positive effect of a municipality's size on local party system nationalisation. Moreover, the analysis uncovers the impact of the electoral dominance of national parties in the local districts at previous national elections: where parliamentary parties have performed weakly at the previous national elections, nationalisation of local party systems increases.Interestingly, the analysis demonstrates that this relationship is stronger in the biggest municipalities, showing an interaction effect between conjunctural and structural factors. Finally, our findings indicate that significant variation remains across Belgian regions. This opens up avenues for future research regarding the potential effects of institutional factors and the 'freezing' of local political offer across subnational party systems.
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