Qualitative Causal Inference and Explanation

David Waldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia where he studies long-term political and economic development using case-study methods. He is the author of State Building & Late Development (Cornell University Press, 1999) and Rethinking the Resource Curse (with Benjamin Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2021), as well as many articles and book chapters on the dynamics of political regime change and qualitative methods.

• 1. Introduction; Part I. Foundations: 2. Causal graphs; 3. Invariant causal mechanisms; 4. Event-history maps; Part II. Qualitative Causal Inference: 5. Inferring causes qualitatively; 6. Evaluating qualitative causal inferences; 7. Comparing methods; Part III. Qualitative Causal Explanations: 8. Causal explanations; 9. Standard explanatory patterns; 10. Looking backward and forward.

'Waldner equips qualitative researchers with a shared language for making causal explanations explicit, debatable, and cumulative across cases, subfields, disciplines, and generations. The payoff of rigorous standards, he shows, is liberation, not constraint: scholars gain the questions they must ask of one another's work-and their own-to deepen what we know.' Jake Bowers, Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign