Abstract
Scholars engaging in comparative historical analysis rely on observational data. The use of these data to analyze causal factors is affected by a number of problems that follow from studying historical developments. First, scholars often face a dearth of data which inhibits both large-n statistical analysis and in-depth qualitative analysis of individual cases. Second, scholars often confront the problem of historical diffusion, a problem that is in itself aggravated by the absence of good historical data. Against this backdrop, this paper devises a “middle-range” framework based on congruence analysis. This framework includes considerations about case selection in the face of diffusion and about the kind of within-case evidence that allows scholars to analyze the causes of political change. The framework devises a systematic way of converting narrative historical descriptions into within-case binary observations. This conversion allows other scholars to replicate the analysis in a transparent way and to probe the validity of the scoring based on the sources referred to. The framework is illustrated via empirical analysis of the origins and development of representative institutions in the medieval Crown of Aragon.
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Notes
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See Lange (2012) for an overview of these methods in comparative historical analysis.
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There are a series of standard ways to address the problem of diffusion in quantitative comparative historical analysis of the advent of or variation in representative institutions. These include clustering standard errors on regions (e.g., Scandinavia or the Iberian Peninsula), modeling diffusion as convergence by controlling for the initial scores of the political institutions that enter the analysis, and including a variable measuring institutions in neighboring countries. All these techniques are valuable but they cannot substitute for genuinely controlling for diffusion.
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The dearth of historical data has wider ramifications for both quantitative and qualitative analysis of historical processes of political change. It impedes both the attempt to validly score the dependent variable and key explanatory factors across a larger number of cases and the attempt to carry out, for instance, in-depth process tracing in singular cases. That is, it is not only relevant for the attempt to deal with diffusion. In this more general respect, too, the proposed congruence analysis has a competitive edge.
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Indeed, it is quite difficult to delimit the political units of the Middle Ages, which were still not genuinely characterized by territoriality (Poggi 1990), in a meaningful way in comparative analysis. Many analyses have used later nation states as the unit (e.g. Stasavage 2010), something that is highly problematical confronted with the shifting sands of medieval and early modern Europe (but see Abramson and Boix 2014).
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This is not far from the actual situation, although we do not appreciate aspects of Stasavage’s (2010) claim that there were geographical barriers for representation, meaning that smaller units—in spatial terms—would see more often convocations and stronger representative institutions or Boucoyannis’s (2015) claim that state capacity was a prerequisite for representation. That said, Stasavage’s claim shares similarities with the warfare and taxation perspective and Boucoyannis’s claim shares similarities with the public order perspective, which underscores that the partition is close to being exhaustive.
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I here take”taxation” to include “coinage”, that is, the tax which the monarchs received against a promise not to debase the coinage (see Møller 2016).
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to participants at the workshop “From Transparency to Replication in Qualitative Inference”, May 23- 24, 2016 at the University of Essex for valuable input. I also wish to thanks an anonymous reviewer at Quality & Quantity. Finally, thanks to Suthan Krishnarajan for research assistance.
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Møller, J. A framework for congruence analysis in comparative historical analysis of political change. Qual Quant 51, 2337–2355 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-016-0391-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-016-0391-5