Rethinking Social Inquiry

Henry E. Brady is dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently president of the American Political Science Association. David Collier is Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

• Introduction to the Second Edition: A Sea Change in Political MethodologyPart I: A Debate on MethodologyA. Framing the Debate1. Refocusing the Discussion of Methodology2. The Quest for Standards: King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social InquiryB. Critiques of the Quantitative Template3. Doing Good and Doing Better: How Far Does the Quantitative Template Get Us?4. Some Unfulfilled Promises of Quantitative Imperialism5. How Inference in the Social (but Not the Physical) Sciences Neglects Theoretical AnomalyC. Linking the Quantitative and Qualitative Traditions6. Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide7. The Importance of Research DesignD. Diverse Tools, Shared Standards8. Critiques, Responses, and Trade-Offs: Drawing Together the Debate9. Sources of Leverage in Causal Inference: Toward an Alternative View of MethodologyPart II. Causal Inference: Old Dilemmas, New ToolsIntroduction to Part IIE. Qualitative Tools for Causal Inference10. Process Tracing and Causal Inference11. On Types of Scientific Inquiry: The Role of Qualitative Reasoning12. Data-Set Observations versus Causal-Process Observations: The 2000 U.S. Presidential ElectionAddendum: Teaching Process TracingF. Quantitative Tools for Causal Inference13. Regression-Based Inference: A Case Study in Failed Causal Assessment14. Design-Based Inference: Beyond the Pitfalls of Regression Analysis?GlossaryBibliography

Praise for the Second Edition: The new edition of Rethinking Social Inquiry is, quite simply, the best treatise yet on the intersection of qualitative and quantitative methods. The book places causal-process tracing on a new foundation and provides a framework for skeptically evaluating natural experiments. The discussions are conceptually, statistically, and historically rigorous; the examples will have broad appeal.