Conditions of intergovernmental armaments cooperation in Western Europe, 1996–2006

Abstract

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries’ membership rate in cooperative armamentsforaaimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners’ ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armaments.

QCA: A Package for Qualitative Comparative Analysis

“…In line with Ragin's own background, QCA has been initially employed only by a small number of (political) sociologists (e.g., Amenta et al, 1992;Griffin et al, 1991;Wickham-Crowley, 1991). Since then, however, the method has made inroads into political science and international relations (e.g., Thiem, 2011;Vis, 2009), business and economics (e.g., Evans and Aligica, 2008;Valliere et al, 2008), management and organization (e.g., Greckhamer, 2011), legal studies and criminology (Arvind and Stirton, 2010;Miethe and Drass, 1999), education (e.g., Glaesser and Cooper, 2011;Schneider and Sadowski, 2010), and health policy research (e.g., Harkreader and Imershein, 1999;Schensul et al, 2010). Figure 1 charts the trend in the total number of QCA applications that have appeared in peer-reviewed journal articles since 1984, broken down by its three variants crisp-set QCA (csQCA), multi-value QCA (mvQCA) and fuzzy-set QCA (fsQCA).…”

Macrostructural Conditions of Early Versus Late Institutional Inclusion of Same-Sex Couples in the Family: An International Comparison

“…We used qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to determine whether the selected factors were related with the institutional acceptance of same-sex couples in the family. QCA is widely used in social sciences (Epple, Gasser, Kersten, Nollert, & Schief, 2014;Thiem, 2011;Varone, Rothmayr, & Montpetit, 2006). It makes it possible to relate the three indicators of institutional acceptance of same-sex couples in the family to a variety of configurations created by several macrostructural factors.…”

Identifying Complex Causal Dependencies in Configurational Data with Coincidence Analysis

“…Configurational comparative methods (CCMs) subsume techniques for the identification of complex causal dependencies in configurational data using the theoretical framework of Boolean algebra and its various extensions (Rihoux and Ragin, 2009). For example, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA; Ragin, 1987Ragin, , 2000Ragin, , 2008-hitherto the most prominent representative of CCMs-has been applied in areas as diverse as business administration (e.g., Chung, 2001), environmental science (van Vliet et al, 2013), evaluation (Cragun et al, 2014), political science (Thiem, 2011), public health (Longest and Thoits, 2012) and sociology (Crowley, 2013). Besides three stand-alone programs based on graphical user interfaces, three R packages for QCA are currently available, each with a different scope of functionality: QCA (Dusa and Thiem, 2014;Thiem and Duşa, 2013a,c), QCA3 (Huang, 2014) and SetMethods (Quaranta, 2013; an add-on package to Schneider and Wagemann, 2012).…”