Government and Opposition

doi: 10.1017/gov.2019.12pmid: N/A

AbstractThe protests of the Arab Spring sparked hope for a democratic breakthrough in a region long known for its durable systems of authoritarian rule, but optimism soon turned to disappointment. This article argues that the main problem with the post-Arab Spring narrative of failure and regression is that it equates democratization with regime change and places too great a causal burden on protests as the route to its achievement. It proposes that democratization can be understood as a multivalent process encompassing changes occurring at different registers, spurred by different causal mechanisms, and according to different time lines, rather than as a fixed package of changes that proceed in unilinear fashion from different variants of authoritarianism towards a common democratic finish line. Thinking about democratization differently alerts us to vectors of change we might otherwise fail to notice and enables us to move beyond the over-generalizations and over-simplifications that arise when we focus solely on (changes in) macro structures and relations of power.

doi: 10.1017/gov.2018.53pmid: N/A

AbstractThis article reviews recent attempts to develop multi-method social scientific frameworks. The article starts by discussing the ontological and epistemological foundations underlying case studies and variance-based approaches, differentiating approaches into bottom-up, case-based and top-down, variance-based approaches. Case-based approaches aim to learn how a causal process works within a case, whereas variance-based approaches assess mean causal effects across a set of cases. However, because of the different fundamental assumptions, it is very difficult for in-depth studies of individual cases to communicate meaningfully with claims about mean causal effects across a large set of cases. The conclusions discuss the broader challenges this distinction has for the study of comparative politics more broadly.