Designing Historical Social Scientific Inquiry: How Parameter Heterogeneity Can Bridge the Methodological Divide between Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches

Abstract

Seeking to advance historical studies of political institutions and behavior, we argue for an expansion of the standard methodological toolkit with a set of innovative approaches that privilege parameter heterogeneity to capture nuances missed by more commonly used approaches. We address critiques by prominent historians and historically oriented political scientists who have underscored the shortcomings of mainstream quantitative approaches for studying the past. They are concerned that the statistical models ordinarily employed by political scientists are inadequate for addressing temporality, periodicity, specificity, and context—issues that are central to good historical analysis. The innovations that we advocate are particularly well suited for incorporating these issues in empirical models, which we demonstrate with replications of extant research that focuses on locating structural breaks relating to realignments and split‐party Senate delegations and on the temporal evolution in congressional roll‐call behavior connected to labor policy during the New Deal and Fair Deal.

The Historical PresidencyPresidential Incentives, Bureaucratic Control, and Party Building in the Republican Era

“…Scholars such as Adler (), Ellis and Walker (), Galvin and Shogan (), and Klinghard () have provided rich and nuanced accounts of presidential behavior in earlier points in history, while the evidence in support of theories about presidential action in the modern era tends to be largely quantitative in nature (e.g., Berry, Burden, and Howell ; Cameron ; Canes‐Wrone ; Howell ; Howell, Jackman, and Rogowski ; Kriner and Reeves ; Lowande ). Following the approaches described by Wawro and Katznelson (), scholarship on the presidency could be meaningfully advanced by combining detailed, historical knowledge with quantitative approaches designed specifically to explore how institutional changes affected political outcomes of interest. Recent scholarship by McCarty (2009), who shows how changing presidential incentives in the earlier nineteenth century affected the issuance of vetoes, and Cohen (), who shows how presidential agenda setting evolved over the course of U.S. history, illustrate the advantages of such an approach.…”

Causality and History: Modes of Causal Investigation in Historical Social Sciences

“…Long-term correlations (e.g., Dell 2010), lag effects (e.g., Møller et al 2015, Wimmer & Min 2006, and autocorrelations capture the legacies of the past. Models that permit parameter variation help identify shifts and ruptures in relations among variables across temporal contexts (Griffin & Isaac 1992, Wawro & Katznelson 2014, Western & Kleykamp 2004. By modeling cohort and period effects (Voss 1993, ch.…”

Experimental Research Design in the Study of Electoral Systems

“…In the preceding section we argued that the modal research design in our collection of seminal papers in the field is an empirical study that tests theoretical implications with correlational evidence from observational studies, which is also the case in more recent research. Of all publications in the journals we reviewed, 95 explore electoral systems in some form: 88 are quantitative studies and explicitly empirically operationalize electoral systems as either an independent variable (79), as a dependent variable (Aytaç, 2014;Cantú, 2014;Curtice and Marsh, 2014), as both independent and dependent variables (Endersby and Towle, 2014;Miller, 2014), or do not explicitly operationalize electoral institutions but make comparisons across institutions (Adams, Ezrow and Somer-Topcu, 2014;Clark and Leiter, 2014;Grossman and Woll, 2014;Spoon and Klüver, 2014); 5 Two studies are formal theoretical (Cho, 2014;Gans-Morse, Mazzuca and Nichter, 2014) and one is normative (Murray, 2014); and, four studies discuss measurement issues (Krook, 2014;Otjes and Louwerse, 2014;Wawro and Katznelson, 2014;Wilson, 2014).…”