Thad Dunning

University of California, Berkeley

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Susan C. Stokes

University of Chicago

Marcelo Nazareno

Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Guy Grossman

University of Pennsylvania

Susan Hyde

University of California, San Francisco

Macartan Humphreys

Columbia University

Gareth Nellis

Yale University

Craig McIntosh

University of California, San Diego

Valeria Brusco

Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Taylor C. Boas

Boston University

Guadalupe Tuñón

Princeton University

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Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU

University of California, Berkeley

Harvard University Press

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Symposium on Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies

David Collier Gerardo L. Munck Sidney Tarrow Kenneth M. Roberts Robert R. Kaufman

This symposium brings together ten essays that explore hypotheses about critical junctures, understood as major episodes of institutional innovation that generate an enduring legacy. Scholars routinely focus on episodes of innovation that occur in contrasting ways across cases, which in turn yields distinct trajectories of change and produces different legacies. These contrasts readily lend themselves to analysis based on the comparative method, generally combined with process tracing. For the analysis of single cases, the comparison is typically focused on explicit or implicit counterfactual alternatives that might have produced different trajectories of change. The critical juncture framework is seen as offering a set of hypotheses that may or may not fit a given historical situation, and whose actual fit must be demonstrated with great care. The symposium builds on Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) classic study of cleavage structures and party systems, as well as Collier and Collier’s (1991) Shaping the Political Arena. The introduction by the coeditors provides an overall framework for studying critical junctures and the essays apply this framework, while at same time moving the discussion in new directions. The substantive domains explored include state-formation, party systems, neoliberal transformation, religion, law, economic growth, and colonial rebellion. Most essays focus on Latin America, while two discuss Europe and the United States; some analyze developments since the 1980s, whereas others reach back to the 19th century. Given that a critical juncture hypothesis inherently focuses on trajectories of change that extend over a substantial period of time, a key issue debated in the symposium is the amount of historical perspective required to establish that a critical juncture has in fact occurred. Contributors to the symposium, in addition to the coeditors, are Sidney Tarrow, Kenneth M. Roberts, Robert R. Kaufman, Taylor C. Boas, Timothy R. Scully, Jorge I. Dominguez, Sebastian L. Mazzuca, Andrew C. Gould, and Thad Dunning.

Historical institutionalism

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Conditional Balance Tests: Increasing Sensitivity and Specificity With Prognostic Covariates

arXiv (Cornell University) (2022)

Clara Bicalho Adam Bouyamourn Thad Dunning

Researchers often use covariate balance tests to assess whether a treatment variable is assigned "as-if" at random. However, standard tests may shed no light on a key condition for causal inference: the independence of treatment assignment and potential outcomes. We focus on a key factor that affects the sensitivity and specificity of balance tests: the extent to which covariates are prognostic, that is, predictive of potential outcomes. We propose a "conditional balance test" based on the weighted sum of covariate differences of means, where the weights are coefficients from a standardized regression of observed outcomes on covariates. Our theory and simulations show that this approach increases power relative to other global tests when potential outcomes are imbalanced, while limiting spurious rejections due to imbalance on irrelevant covariates.

Spurious relationship

Conditional independence

Predictive power

10.48550/arxiv.2205.10478

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Experimental Thinking: A Primer on Social Science Experiments. By James Druckman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 228p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Perspectives on Politics (2023)

Thad Dunning

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Content (measure theory)

Primer (cosmetics)

10.1017/s1537592723000294

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Decentralization and Ethnic Diversity

Cambridge University Press eBooks (2019)

Thad Dunning

10.1017/9781108615594.011

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Cross-cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali

American Political Science Review (2010)

Thad Dunning Lauren Harrison

Social scientists often attribute moderation of the political salience of ethnicity in ethnically diverse societies to the presence of cross-cutting cleavages—that is, to dimensions of identity or interest along which members of the same ethnic group may have diverse allegiances. Yet, estimating the causal effects of cross-cutting cleavages is difficult. In this article, we present experimental results that help explain why ethnicity has a relatively minor political role in Mali, an ethnically heterogeneous sub-Saharan African country in which ethnic identity is a poor predictor of vote choice and parties do not form along ethnic lines. We argue that the cross-cutting ties afforded by an informal institution called “cousinage” help explain the weak association between ethnicity and individual vote choice. The experimental research design we introduce may be useful in many other settings.

Salience (neuroscience)

Moderation

10.1017/s0003055409990311

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Citations (296)

Field and Natural Experimental Evidence from Indian Village Councils

Thad Dunning

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Evaluating natural experiments

Thad Dunning

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Crude democracy: natural resource wealth and political regimes

Choice Reviews Online (2009)

Thad Dunning

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy. Oil and other forms of mineral wealth can promote both authoritarianism and democracy, the book argues, but they do so through different mechanisms; an understanding of these different mechanisms can help elucidate when either the authoritarian or democratic effects of resource wealth will be relatively strong. Exploiting game-theoretic tools and statistical modeling as well as detailed country case studies and drawing on fieldwork in Latin America and Africa, this book builds and tests a theory that explains political variation across resource-rich states. It will be read by scholars studying the political effects of natural resource wealth in many regions, as well as by those interested in the emergence and persistence of democratic regimes.

10.5860/choice.46-7042

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Citations (525)

Bibliography

Cambridge University Press eBooks (2008)

Thad Dunning

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Bibliography

10.1017/cbo9780511510052.012

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Building strong designs through multi-method research

Cambridge University Press eBooks (2012)

Thad Dunning

This book has sought to provide a comprehensive—though far from exhaustive—discussion of the discovery, analysis, and evaluation of natural experiments. I have emphasized that the strongest natural experiments contribute markedly to causal inference. In the best case, natural experiments allow us to learn about the effects of causes that are difficult to manipulate experimentally, while obviating the substantial problems of confounding associated with conventional observational studies. At the same time, I have underscored the potential limitations of this approach and identified three dimensions on which specific natural experiments may fall short: plausibility of as-if random, credibility of models, and relevance of interventions.

10.1017/cbo9781139084444.016

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