This paper presents a new statistical method that is well-suited to building and testing theories of change. An exploratory, robust two-way analysis of New Hampshire’s county-level presidential election returns for the past eighty years illustrates how this general technique can help to clarify theoretical concepts as well as to reveal systematic regularities in empirical data.

Because two-way analysis involves a number of novel techniques, this paper is primarily a methodological exposition. It devotes much more attention to step-by-step details of how the analysis was carried out, and the accompanying exhibits contain much more detailed information than normally would be the case for reporting results of such research.

In contrast to classical methods, the techniques presented in this paper are intended primarily for exploration of data rather than for statistical inference. They require very few assumptions about the data, and they are not unduly influenced by extreme or missing values. Graphic and semi-graphic devices keep the analyst close to the data and make it possible to display many numbers simultaneously in contrast to simple single-number summaries which can conceal information. Removing obvious regularities in the data facilitates discovery of other underlying patterns.

The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.

For the better part of the past generation, social scientists have devoted much of their best effort to the study of modernization. Economists have examined growth and development. Demographers have detailed the demographic transition. Anthropoligists have observed the dissolution of traditional societies. Social psychologists have measured the emergence of achievement motivation. Sociologists have traced the myriad patterns of secularization, professionalization, bureaucratization, and rationalization. Yet for all their effort it seems scarcely an exaggeration to call modernization still the critical enigma of contemporary social science. Its meaning appears to recede ever further from us. Its substance grows more mysterious the more that it is studied, and its origin and evolution become more inexplicable.