Best C&M Working Paper Award

The Committee on Concepts and Methods publishes two highly regarded series of working papers. Each year, at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Committee distinguishes the best paper published in either of its two series during the preceding calendar year.

C&M Best Working Paper Award 2011

The first C&M Best Working Paper Award was awarded to David Kuehn (University of Heidelberg) and Ingo Rohlfing (University of Cologne) for "Causal Explanation and Multi-Method Research in the Social Sciences" (Political Methods 26, February 2010).

 Award Citation:

Multimethod research is one of the major new research agendas and methodologies of the last 10 years. One signal of this is the change in name of the APSA qualitative methods section to "Qualitative and Multimethod." Critical to this new methodology is combining qualitative methods, typically case studies with quantitative and statistical methods. "Causal Explanation and Multi-Method Research in the Social Sciences" explores an absolutely central aspect of this methodology: the relationship between cross-case statistical analyses with within-case qualitative analyses.  The paper insightfully discusses how the probabilistic nature of statistical analyses can be merged with process tracing and causal inference within-cases, which often have a deterministic character. Kuehn and Rohlfing argue that multimethod research is quite problematic when the causal relationship is probabilistic. The committee feels that this paper is one of the first to directly address this key issue head on, and believes it will become core reading in the multimethod literature.

2011 Award Jury:

Gary Goertz, University of Arizona (chair)
Daniela Piana, University of Bologna
Markus Haverland, Erasmus University Rotterdam 

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