Amidst rising concern about publication bias, pre-registration and results-blind review have grown rapidly in use. Yet discussion of both the problem of publication bias and of potential solutions has been remarkably narrow in scope: publication bias has been understood largely as a problem afflicting quantitative studies, while pre-registration and results-blind review have been almost exclusively applied to experimental or otherwise prospective research. This chapter examines the potential contributions of pre-registration and results-blind review to qualitative and quantitative retrospective research. First, the chapter provides an empirical assessment of the degree of publication bias in qualitative political science research. Second, it elaborates a general analytic framework for evaluating the feasbility and utility of pre-registration and results-blind review for confirmatory studies. Third, through a review of published studies, the paper demonstrates that much observational—and, especially, qualitative—political science research displays features that would make for credible pre-registration. The paper concludes that pre-registration and results-blind review have the potential to enhance the validity of confirmatory research across a range of empirical methods, while elevating exploratory work by making it harder to disguise discovery as testing.

This chapter examines the uses of process tracing for empirically testing ideational explanations and theories of political decision-making. Ideational mechanisms have characteristics that make them especially difficult to study, as compared to materially driven causal processes. Ideas are unusually difficult to measure and are often highly correlated with other plausible causes of political outcomes. Moreover, key mechanisms of ideational influence operate within a “black box” of unobservability from the perspective of the historical researcher. These challenges of ideational analysis motivate this chapter’s arguments in two respects. On one level, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that process tracing represents an especially powerful empirical approach for distinguishing between ideational and material effects. At the same time, the chapter reckons with the considerable challenges that the study of ideational causation presents, even for careful process tracing.

The chapter offers ideational analysts a set of process tracing strategies as well as guidance in identifying the conditions under which each strategy can be fruitfully applied. Broadly, it emphasizes three hallmarks of effective tracing of ideational processes. The first of these is “expansive empirical scope.” It is tempting for analysts testing ideational explanations to zero in on key moments of political decision, on the handful of elite actors who were “at the table,” and on the reasons that they provided for their choices. However, for reasons outlined below, a narrow focus on critical choice points will rarely be sufficient for distinguishing ideational from alternative explanations. To detect ideational effects, our analytic field of view must be expansive in terms of both temporal range and level of analysis. A well-specified theory of ideas will imply predictions not just about individual elites’ statements and behavior at key moments of choice, but also about continuity and change, sequences of events, flows of information, and movements of actors across institutional settings over time.

After 22 years in office – and having dominated federal politics for six decades – Canada's Liberal Party found itself thrust into opposition at the election of 1957. Despite the Liberals' winning a plurality of the popular vote, Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system handed a larger seat share to John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives (PCs), who went on to form a minority government. When Diefenbaker called a snap election the following year, the results were more devastating: the PC Party emerged with the largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history, reducing the Liberal caucus to 48 members in the 265-seat House of Commons.

Resounding defeat provoked a period of ideological conflict and soul-searching within the Liberal Party, prompting debate over the party's direction on a range of social and economic issues. On matters of social welfare, the Liberals had some rightful claim to a legacy of popular reform. Under the governments of William Lyon Mackenzie King, the party had laid the foundations of the modern Canadian welfare state, enacting means-tested old-age pensions in 1927, unemployment insurance in 1940, and family allowances in 1945. Under Mackenzie King's successor, Louis St. Laurent, universal pensions followed in 1951 and national hospital insurance in 1957. At the same time, over the course of the 1950s, St. Laurent's party had lost the initiative in the field of social policy, moving only slowly and grudgingly toward expansions of the welfare state and allowing itself to be outflanked by the opposition.

The politics of public policy is at once a struggle over who gets what and a struggle over when. In designing state action, governments face choices not just about the cross-sectional incidence of gains and losses, but also about how the benefits and burdens of policy should be allocated over time. In arenas ranging from environmental protection to economic reform to the management of scarce natural resources, the impact of public policy on citizens and societies may depend as much on the intertemporal character of governments' decisions as on their distributive profile. Moreover, as the preceding chapters have sought to demonstrate, explaining policy trade-offs over time requires a theoretical apparatus attuned to the distinctive cognitive and strategic features of intertemporal decision making.

The present chapter seeks first to summarize the evidence from the case studies in light of the book's theoretical framework. Then, expanding outward from specific causal hypotheses, I consider a set of general implications of the analysis for the study of public policymaking more broadly. In particular, the book's findings shed light on the relationship between distributive and intertemporal policy choice, on the nature of politicians' goals, on politicians' opportunities for electoral blame-avoidance, and on the role of ideas in policymaking. Finally, we will return to the exceptional Canadian episode of program design and consider the distinctive political logic of investment for the short term.

In Britain's first major state effort to protect against poverty in old age, the country's Liberal government in 1908 created a means-tested, tax-financed pension scheme that began paying pensions at age 70. Initially popular among beneficiaries, the scheme was soon strained politically by rapidly rising prices during World War I and mounting criticism of the inequities and indignities of the means test. The old-age pensioners' lobby became increasingly militant in its demands for more generous state benefits on a universal basis. Meanwhile, as trade unions gathered organizational strength and the right to vote was extended to the nonpropertied, the parliamentary Labour Party tremendously improved its electoral position. Though the government increased pension levels during and after the war as partial compensation for inflation, electoral and social pressures for more generous and widely available pensions grew. Postwar governments of all partisan stripes contemplated either supplementing or replacing the 1908 system. While organized labor and most of the Labour Party called for universal tax-financed pensions, the Conservative Party began in the early 1920s to investigate the possibility of a contributory pension scheme, free of a means test.

In the midst of these preparations came the watershed election of 1924. The vote that year marked the end of the Liberal Party as a serious contender for government office. With 48.3 percent of the vote in a three-way contest in a first-past-the-post electoral system, the Conservatives won 419 parliamentary seats to Labour's 151 and the Liberals' 40 – the largest Tory majority since 1832.