John Gerring is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books, most recently: The Production of Knowledge: Enhancing Progress in Social Science (Cambridge, 2020; with Colin Elman & James Mahoney), and Population and Politics: The Impact of Scale (Cambridge, 2020; with Wouter Veenendaal), along with numerous articles. He is co-editor of Strategies for Social Inquiry, a book series at Cambridge University Press. Jason Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela (2012), Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools (Cambridge, 2016), and Billionaires and Stealth Politics (2019, with Benjamin I. Page and Matthew Lacombe), along with numerous articles.

• 1. Introduction John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 2. Current practices John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 3. Contributions to knowledge John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 4. Strategies John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 5. Heuristics John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 6. Case selection John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 7. Soaking and poking John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 8. Theoretical frameworks John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 9. Explanatory challenges John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 10. Tools and tips for theorizing John Gerring, Jason Seawright; 11. From exploration to testing John Gerring, Jason Seawright.

'Exploration and inspiration are necessary to locate a good social science topic; and this book tells you why and shows you how. Playful and insightful; highly recommended.' Richard Swedberg, Cornell University, New York