Historical Knowledge and Quantitative Analysis: The Case of the Origins of Proportional Representation

Political scientists commonly draw on history but often do not read actual historians carefully. This limited engagement with historians, and with contextual information more generally, contributes to a loss of historical knowledge that can undermine the validity of quantitative analysis. This artic...

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Published inThe American political science review Vol. 104; no. 2; pp. 369 - 392
Main Author KREUZER, MARCUS
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.05.2010
Subjects
Cooperation
Debates
Democracy
Elections
Electoral reform
Electoral Systems
Evidence
FORUM
Historians
History
Hypotheses
Industrial development
Information sources
Insurance policies
Knowledge management
Labor market
Labor markets
Liberalism
Plurality voting
Political parties
Political representation
Political science
Political Scientists
Political theory
Politics
Proportional Representation
Quantitative analysis
Quantitative Methods
Skills
Socialism
Statistical analysis
Statistical data
Vocational Education
Voting
Voting rights
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Summary:Political scientists commonly draw on history but often do not read actual historians carefully. This limited engagement with historians, and with contextual information more generally, contributes to a loss of historical knowledge that can undermine the validity of quantitative analysis. This article makes this argument by means of an examination of the qualitative evidence underlying the important quantitative arguments about the origins of electoral systems advanced by Carles Boix and by Thomas Cusack, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice. The article explores how their respective attention to historical knowledge affects the quality of their data, the plausibility of their hypotheses, and, ultimately, the robustness of their statistical findings. It also analyzes how such knowledge sheds new light on the causal direction between institutions and their economic effects.
Bibliography:PII:S0003055410000122
ArticleID:00012
I want to thank Ellen Meeker and Rumela Sen for their fabulous research assistance; CIS and Boix for making their data sets available; Maria Toyoda, Robert DeFina, and Christine Kelleher-Palus for tolerating endless office visits with yet another footnote size query. Margaret Anderson, Julia Lynch, Mark Pollack, Richard Deeg, Rudy Sils, Jack Nagel, Stathis Kalyvas, Athanassios Roussias, Pablo Beramendi, Alex Kirshner, Laura Flamand, Luis Enrique Schiumerini, and Chris Wlezien for their insightful comments. The biggest thanks go to Peter Swenson, the reviewers, and, above all, the editorial team at UCLA whose criticisms were as voluminous as they were helpful; they transformed the original draft beyond recognition.
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ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055410000122