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Logical Constraints: The Limitations of QCA in Social Science Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

Kevin A. Clarke Open the ORCID record for Kevin A. Clarke [Opens in a new window]
Kevin A. Clarke*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0146, USA. Email: [email protected]
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*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Researchers employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and its variants use two-element Boolean algebra to compare cases and identify putative causal conditions. I show that the two-element Boolean algebra constrains research in three important ways: it restricts what we can say about sets and the interactions between sets, it embodies a logical language that is too weak to capture modern social science theories, and it restricts our analysis of causation to necessity and sufficiency accounts and does not allow for counterfactuals. Modern quantitative analysis suffers none of these restrictions and provides a much richer way to understand the social world.

Keywords

QCAprobabilitylogic
Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 552 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology.

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Footnotes

Contributing Editor: Jeff Gill

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