Standards of Good Practice and the Methodology of Necessary Conditions in Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The analysis of necessary conditions for some outcome of interest has long been one of the main preoccupations of scholars in all disciplines of the social sciences. In this connection, the introduction of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in the late 1980s has revolutionized the way research on necessary conditions has been carried out. Standards of good practice for QCA have long demanded that the results of preceding tests for necessity constrain QCA's core process of Boolean minimization so as to enhance the quality of parsimonious and intermediate solutions. Schneider and Wagemann's Theory-Guided/Enhanced Standard Analysis (T/ESA) is currently being adopted by applied researchers as the new state-of-the-art procedure in this respect. In drawing on Schneider and Wagemann's own illustrative data example and a meta-analysis of thirty-six truth tables across twenty-one published studies that have adhered to current standards of good practice in QCA, I demonstrate that, once bias against compound conditions in necessity tests is accounted for, T/ESA will produce conservative solutions, and not enhanced parsimonious or intermediate ones.

Realists and Idealists in QCA

“…Thiem chooses to dismiss all but empirical consistency without providing convincing, or sometimes even any, arguments. In my view,-and notwithstanding Thiem's (2017) claim to the contrary (fn 3)-the only coherent critique at ESA would be to take the position of a QCA idealist and argue that separate tests of necessity are meaningless. Since Thiem (2017) does not take a coherent idealist position and instead accepts the realist strategy of separate analyses for necessity and sufficiency, it follows that his argument must be evaluated by the rules and practices of QCA realists.…”

“…These authors explicitly argue that the consistency threshold should be considerably higher (at least 0.9) for necessity relations. Nowhere in Thiem (2017) is it argued in which sense prevailing reasoning about choosing high consistency thresholds for necessary conditions is flawed and in need of being changed. Even from a QCA idealist position it sounds implausible to lower the consistency threshold to 0.75.…”

“…ESA, together with existing standards, is a tool for combining the analysis of necessary conditions with that of sufficient conditions under the constraint of often noisy social science data. Thiem (2017) does not question the appropriateness of the core purpose of ESA: to avoid untenable assumptions. What he dismisses are the criteria that distinguish meaningful necessary conditions from meaningless supersets.…”

“…Section 4 concludes with some broader reflections on the split between QCA idealists and realists. Thiem's (2017) crucial claim for producing the CONSOL effect is that scholars must declare as necessary any superset (be it a single set or a disjunction 2 ) of the outcome if only it passes a predefined consistency threshold. Contrary to that, QCA realists have formulated several criteria that need to be applied during the search for necessary conditions: empirical consistency, empirical relevance, and conceptual meaningfulness.…”

Electoral violence under different contexts. Evidence from the Western Balkans

“…Inclusion threshold for the truth table is set at the level 0.75 with the minimum number of cases included being one (see truth table in Appendix C). In accordance with the recommendations of recent methodological advancements, we do not carry out isolated analyses of simple necessary conditions before proceeding to the Boolean minimization (Thiem 2016b). In response to the recent methodological dispute on interpretation of solution terms, the paper roots its analysis in the work of Michael Baumgartner and Alrik Thiem and follows a recommendation to report parsimonious solution as the only type of the three QCA solution types that is not methodologically biased (Thiem 2016a).…”