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Coding Historical Qualitative Cases and Explaining Outcomes: A Rejoinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2017

Scott Mainwaring
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Abstract

This rejoinder responds to Kenneth Roberts’s criticisms of my review published in these pages in August 2016. Roberts’s book, Changing Course, is a major contribution to scholarship on Latin American party systems, but Roberts and I disagree about three key issues. Firstly, because Roberts measured the economic effects of different kinds of party systems beginning in 1980, his coding of party systems must be immediately prior to that. Secondly, Roberts and I agree that many Latin American party systems exhibited deep change during the long era of important substitution industrialization (roughly 1940–80). In my judgement, the coding of party systems should reflect these changes more than Changing Course does. Thirdly, following principles for understanding causation, I argue that Changing Course does not conclusively show that labour-mobilizing party systems caused deeper economic crises and greater party system instability than elitist party systems.

Keywords

Latin American party systemscoding historical qualitative casesunderstanding causation
Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 549 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

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Scott Mainwaring is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Contact email: scott_mainwaring@hks.harvard.edu.

References

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. (1985), ‘Preliminary Overview of the Latin American Economy during 1985’, http://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/31674/S8500261_en.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.Google Scholar
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Roberts, K.M. (2017), ‘Periodization and Party System Institutionalization in Latin America: A Reply to Mainwaring’, Government and Opposition: An International Journal of Comparative Politics, April, published early online, doi: 10.1017/gov.2017.8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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