THE CASE STUDY METHOD

The Case Study Methods

Case Study

Twenty-first century political science remains divided along methodological lines. Hard versus soft, quantitative versus qualitative, descriptive versus inferential, are more than familiar monikers that separate our research agendas, journals, graduate programs, funding sources, hiring committees, and our professional associations' politics. The rise most recently of the Perestroika movement is only the most recent manifestation of the level of perceived division among political scientists, for the Caucus for a New Political Science launched similar methodological criticisms across the bow of the discipline's vanguard forty years earlier. In the past decade, however, some in the discipline took up the burden of conciliation and tried to mend these divisions. “KKV” in particular seek to provide political scientists with what they see are a common ground in the best practices of statistical inference that can encompass both quantitative and qualitative predilections with equal rigor. Other mediators instead argue that unity obtains through excising methods driven approaches altogether.

In this paper, we argue that these attempts at reconciliation are neither new nor completely correct. Using V.O. Key's Southern Politics, we show how a scholar broached the concerns that both KKV and others advocate a half century earlier. More than a simple amalgamation of the two approaches, Key's work was not only statistically rigorous and “problem driven” but also vividly assessed the limitations to both approaches as products of politics - the object of our study. Never defeatist, Key's “method” was one that was, and still is, as scientific as we can possibly hope to achieve.

In recent decades there have been several attempts to declare a truce between area studies and disciplinary political science, focusing on potentials for complementarily instead of competition. Little substantive guidance, however, has been offered about how to accomplish this conciliation. While the truce appears to be ...