The Grammar of Time

Marcus Kreuzer is Professor of Political Science Department, Villanova University. His research builds a bridge between the worlds of history and social science methodology. His earlier research focused on the 19th century origins of modern democracy and the role party systems played in the consolidation of interwar and post-communist democracies. His subsequent work on comparative historical methodology has won several best paper awards from American Political Science Association. He also regularly teaches comparative historical analysis at various methods schools.

• Introduction: how to study a disorderly world in an orderly fashion; Section I. The Temporal foundations of comparative historical analysis; 1. Historical thinking: stop talking about testing for once!; 2. Varieties of historical time: history is not a dummy variable; 3. Physical time: capturing the rhythms of history; Section II. How to use history to describe patterns; 4. A primer on the origins of electoral systems; 5. Eventful analysis: using dates to explore patterns of (dis-) continuities; 6. Longue Durée analysis: looking for serial patterns; 7. Macro-causal analysis: physical time and the temporal construction of theories; Section III. What about causality?; 8. situating comparative historical analysis: heterodox yet still systematic; 9. Historical explanations: making sense of continuities and discontinuities; 10. Causal process tracing: making testing symmetric; Conclusion: different origins and shared complementarities.

'Testing theories with historical data has become increasingly popular among social scientists. Often, however, history is 'used' uncritically, after stripping social and political phenomena of their spatial and temporal context, or by forcing monocausal models on complex and distant realities. Kreuzer's impressive volume offers a very persuasive warning against such strategies and proposes a conceptual apparatus to use history consciously in the social sciences. Written in a very accessible language, this book should be required reading for all graduate students and social scientists who plan to engage with history.' Giovanni Capoccia, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Oxford