This chapter offers a primer of the literature on the origins of proportional representation. Subsequent chapters use this literature to illustrate the elements of CHA. It therefore provides the background information to make those illustration easier tofollow.

CHA’s focus on exploration, description, and theorizing does not mean that questions of causal inference are ignored. CHA values exploration just as much as testing, on the grounds that only an equal weighing of them will translate results into actual answers. Its approach to methodology is more heterodox than that of methodologies that concentrate narrowly on questions of causal inference. This heterodoxy reflects an older, traditional understanding of methodology as a series of research cycles. Each cycle has an exploratory stage that involves exploration, description, conceptualization, and theorizing and a confirmatory stage that involves data collection, data analysis, and replications. In addition to having those stages, research cycles are iterative and constantly update our knowledge. CHA employs those elements of the research cycle in nonlinear fashion and thus engages in a kind methodological bricolage or what is sometimes called abduction. The goal of bricolage is to align the ontological presuppositions of methods with the ontological attributes of questions. Methods thus differ in their appropriateness rather than in their sophistication.

Research in the natural sciences follows a cycle from exploratory research with tentative findings (descriptive and correlational work) to more definitive causal claims. This chapter argues that the social sciences (particularly political science) would benefit from a wider application of this research cycle model. Creating space in top journals for tentative (novel) conclusions instead of precise estimation of causal effects could lead to greater causal explanations in the long term. This division of labor within the research cycle would require changing evaluations of a work’s contribution to research based on its location within the cycle. Causal explanations are still the goal of research in this model, but are facilitated by an openness to preliminary and tentative findings.