Big Questions, Little Answers Barbara Geddes

CHAPTER 2
Big Questions, Little Answers
How the Questions You Choose Affect
the Answers You Get
For the scholar who wants to contribute to the accumulation of
knowledge, the first step in the process is choosing a question to
investigate. This chapter makes some suggestions about how to
shape research questions to increase the likelihood that they will
yield compelling and robust theories. The early part of the chap-
ter is an attempt to articulate some of the values and emotions
that I believe motivate good scholars. These values and emotions
undergird much research, but they are rarely expressed. On the
contrary, the advice given to beginning scholars often implies the
opposite values. Here I discuss the role of curiosity, indignation,
and passion in the selection and framing of research topics.
In the second and much longer part of the chapter, I suggest a
change in the way we usually think about the kinds of big, world-
transforming subjects that comparativists often choose to study.
Large-scale phenomena such as democratic breakdown, eco-
nomic development, democratization, economic liberalization,
and revolution result from the convergence of a number of differ-
ent processes, some of which occur independently from others.
No simple theory is likely to explain such compound outcomes.
In principle, a complex, multifaceted theory might successfully
do so, but in practice the task of constructing such theories has
daunted most analysts. I propose changing the way we approach
these questions. Instead of trying to "explain" such compound
outcomes as wholes, I suggest a focus on the various processes
that contribute to the final outcome, with the goal of theorizing
these processes individually and generating testable propositions
about them. In contrast to much of the methodological advice
given in this book, the suggestions in this chapter do not derive
from the logic of quantitative research. I cannot make any claim
that this research strategy is more "correct" than any other. My
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28 Paradigms and Sand Castles
argument rests, rather, on the judgment that it is a more effective
route to an accumulation of theoretical knowledge. The proof of
the pudding is in the eating, however, and until we have some
pudding, we cannot taste it. The last part of the chapter is an
extended example of how to break up a big question into multi-
ple processes, theorize one of them, and then test one of the
implications of the theory thus devised.
"Science as a Vocation," Not Just a Job: Choosing a
Research Topic
Students are often advised to choose research topics by looking
for holes in the literature or by reading the ads in the Personnel
Newsletter of the American Political Science Association to see
what topics are hot. This advice conveys the impression that the
search for research topics can and perhaps should be methodi-
cal and instrumental. This impression is false, and the advice,
if followed, leads to a number of perversities: taking The Lit-
erature seriously whether it merits it or not; the selection of a
topic that will become outdated before the dissertation is done;
boredom.
Curiosity, fascination, and indignation should guide the choice
of research topic. Emotion has been banned from most of the
research enterprise, and properly so. But one place it should
remain is in the choosing of research topics. The standard advice
on how to choose a topic leaves out the role of such emotions as
commitment, irritation, and obsession.
An especially thoughtful version of the standard advice is ar-
ticulated by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba
(1994, 15-17), who advise students to pick topics that are impor-
tant in the world and that contribute to an identifiable scholarly
literature. Beginning scholars are advised to:
i. Choose a hypothesis seen as important by scholars in
the literature but for which no one has completed a
systematic study. ..
2. Choose a hypothesis in the literature that we suspect is
false (or one we believe has not been adequately con-
firmed) and investigate whether it is indeed false. ..

3. Attempt to resolve or provide further evidence of one
side of a controversy in the literature - perhaps demon-

29
strate that the controversy was unfounded from the
start.
4. Design research to illuminate or evaluate unques-
tioned assumptions in the literature.
5. Argue that an important topic has been overlooked in
the literature and then proceed to contribute a system-
atic study to the area. (16-17)
It would be difficult to disagree with any of this advice, and it is
probably very useful to students in the sciencelike parts of social
science. It assumes, however, that the relevant literature really
does contain a considerable accumulation of theory and stylized
facts. It thus fails to take into account the real state of a good deal
of the literature in comparative politics. The literature on some
subjects contains only a few arguments generally accepted as true;
many controversies in which the hypotheses on both sides lack
both clarity and strong empirical support; and large amounts of
opinion and conjecture, unsupported by systematic evidence but
nevertheless often referred to as theory. Such a literature creates a
fuzzy research frontier. The reader finds not well-defined holes in
the literature but swampy quagmires. Students who wade into
these literatures often find themselves sinking into the quicksand
of contested definitions and chasing after nebulous dependent
variables that flit around like will-o'-the-wisps.
Consequently, good research in the field is more often moti-
vated by curiosity about the world and intuition about cause-and-
effect relationships than might be true in a field with more accu-
mulated knowledge and a more clearly defined research frontier.
Much of what is eventually judged to be exciting research in the
comparative field either addresses subjects not covered in the
literature or addresses old subjects in very novel ways, rather
than extending the existing literature.
Contrary to the advice about looking for holes in the litera-
ture, good research in the comparative field often begins either
with an intense but unfocused curiosity about why some event or
process has happened or with a sense of sputtering indignation at

the patent idiocy of some particular argument advanced in the
literature. Sometimes political commitments or an aroused sense
of injustice drive this curiosity or indignation. Potential research-
ers who feel little curiosity, intuition, or indignation in response
to the social world and the arguments published about it should
consider the possibility that they have chosen the wrong job.
The literature does play a role in the choice of a research
topic, but not in the mechanical way suggested by the standard
advice.
It stimulates the indignation, annoyance, and irritation that
often fuel good research. When one reads an argument, finds it
utterly implausible, and believes that one can find evidence to
demonstrate that it is wrong beyond the possibility of refutation,
one has indeed found a hole in the literature. Generally, how-
ever, these holes are not found through coolheaded searches.
Instead, our gut-level response of irritation causes us to pause
and notice them while we are reading for some other purpose.
Moreover, such holes cannot be found unless the reader has
sufficient background knowledge of facts to notice that the argu-
ment seems inconsistent with reality.
Arguments in the literature also create expectations about
how events will play out in as yet unexamined cases. When we
have some information about such cases that leads us to believe
they may not meet expectations, our curiosity is aroused. Cases
and outcomes may capture our interest because they differ from
other cases or from what theory has led us to expect. Such out-
comes call for explanation because they are anomalous when
compared with other known or apparently understood instances.
At this stage, the comparison may be entirely implicit, and the
analyst may focus on the anomalous case; but without the im-
plicit comparison, there would be no basis for considering the
case interesting or puzzling.
I emphasize the emotional aspects of choosing research topics
because these emotions contribute to the intense commitment to
finding out what really causes things to happen that leads to good
research. As Max Weber asserted, "Without this strange intoxica-
tion, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion. . . you
have no calling for science and you should do something else"
(1958, 135).
Fostering Creativity
In the same essay, Weber also stressed the importance of the
nonmethodical aspects of thought - intuition and inspiration. He

emphasized the importance of having ideas, that is, of creativity:
Certainly enthusiasm is a prerequisite of the "inspiration"
which is decisive. Nowadays . . . there is a widespread no-

3I
tion that science has become a problem in calculation, fabri-
cated in laboratories or statistical filing systems just as "in a
factory," a calculation involving only the cool intellect and
not one's "heart and soul". . . . [but] some idea has to oc-
cur to someone's mind . . . if one is to accomplish anything
worthwhile. And such intuition cannot be forced. It has
nothing to do with any cold calculation. (1958, 135)
Creativity is distributed as unequally among us as everything
else, and very little is understood about it. Nevertheless, I be-
lieve that the way we train ourselves in graduate school and for
the rest of our lives determines how much combustible material
our creative sparks will find to ignite. Weber stressed that the soil
in which ideas grow is normally prepared by very hard work. I
will go further and suggest that some kinds of hard work are
more likely to bear fruit than others.
Original ideas grow out of having individual and autonomous
reactions to the world. We can have such reactions only on the
basis of our own inner sense of how the world works. The task of
the apprentice scholar, therefore, is to develop this inner sense.
This process can be helped along in a somewhat conscious and
systematic manner. Good scholarship arises from the interaction
of observation and conjecture. We can intentionally increase the
amount of observation we have to draw upon and thus deepen
our ability to speculate fruitfully; we do this by exposing our-
selves to large amounts of information, whether by wide reading
about many countries and over long historical periods or via the
scrutiny of masses of quantitative data. However it is done, the
scholar is filling his or her stores with information within which
to hunt for patterns and with which to probe the plausibility of
hypotheses. I would urge all students to get into the habit of
creating formal or informal "data sets," that is, collecting and
storing in some place other than their own fallible brains large
quantities of factual information. (For some kinds of informa-
tion, Excel spreadsheets are the perfect storage medium, but in
other situations there may be no substitute for old-fashioned

index cards.)
The kind of information that should be collected, of course,
depends on the scholar's interests. Whatever the topic, however,
it is always useful to find out about it in countries and times
outside one's primary area of expertise. For example, if the stu-
dent's interests center on how oil wealth has affected government

in Middle Eastern countries, he should also stockpile some infor-
mation on forms of government and uses of oil revenues in coun-
tries of other regions. The student interested in the effects of
political institutions on the development of party systems in new
democracies should resist the temptation to base her speculations
on the experience of the countries most thoroughly covered in
the literature-for example, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil-and
should make sure she knows basic facts about electoral institu-
tions and party systems in the small, less studied countries of
Latin America and, if at all possible, in the new democracies of
the rest of the world.
Having this kind of factual knowledge base helps the scholar to
avoid making unfounded claims about the uniqueness of particu-
lar events, processes, or countries and also to avoid mistaking the
simplified portraits of events often found in the literature for realis-
tic descriptions. Much of the literature on many subjects in the
comparative field is dominated by descriptions of events in a few
much-studied countries. Much of the transitions literature on La-
tin America, for example, focuses on Brazil, Argentina, and Chile
(along with Spain). Scholars working on transitions in other parts
of the world assume that this literature accurately describes the
general transition experience of Latin America, but it does not.
Transitions have also occurred in Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay,
Peru, and most of Central America. In some ways, the transitions
in most of these latter countries more closely resemble those of
African countries than those of the more often studied and more
industrialized Southern Cone countries. If one's knowledge of
Latin American transitions comes solely from the best known
transitions literature, conclusions about differences between La-
tin American transitions and those in other regions will be inaccu-
rate. Increases in factual information, however, improve the
chance of finding the patterns that really exist.
A second aid to creativity arises from becoming fluent in the
use of various kinds of models. When models - even such simple
ones as the prisoner's dilemma - enter our imaginative reper-
toires, they make possible interpretations of information that

simply would not have occurred to us otherwise.
A model is a simplified representation of a process. Its pur-
pose is to illuminate a basic logic underlying the process that
might not be perceptible from observation of the entire compli-
cated reality overlaid, as all reality is, with multitudinous irrele-
vant details. A good model- one that is useful, fruitful, or

33
exciting - shows both its creator and those who are exposed to it
something about the process that they had not perceived before.'
When a model seems to fit the essential features of a situation, it
enables the analyst to understand that situation more clearly and
deeply than before. It also aids in communicating this under-
standing to others.
The collective action problem, usually expressed in purely
verbal terms, is probably the best-known example of a model
that simply changed the way we understand the world. Prior to
the dissemination of the idea that individuals will not find it
rational to expend their own resources in order to secure public
goods for groups of which they are members, the failure of vari-
ous disadvantaged groups to organize politically was considered
puzzling. Much ink was spilled explaining false consciousness.
Since Mancur Olson's very striking articulation (1965) of the
collective action problem, our baseline expectations about politi-
cal mobilization have been inverted. We now find it puzzling,
and hence worthy of explanation, when large groups do manage
to organize in order to press for some public good.
Another widely used model is the idea of evolutionary selec-
tion. The central idea here is that outcomes may occur in the
absence of intentional decision making because the actors, orga-
nizations, states, parties, or other entities that fail to behave in
certain ways will lose office or go out of existence. Thus the only
ones that remain will be those that did behave as required, even
though they may not have understood their situation or made
conscious decisions about it. Probably the most famous example
of the use of this logic comes from Richard Nelson and Sidney
Winter (1982), who found that managers of firms do not really
think much about maximizing profit. Nevertheless, they argue,
firms behave as though their managers sought to maximize
profit, because the firms of those managers who deviate greatly
from what they would do if they were maximizing profit go bank-
rupt. The same logic can be used to explain the prevalence of
contiguous territorial states as the main large-scale form of gover-

nance in the world today. At one time, many rulers laid claims to
noncontiguous pieces of territory, and they did not decide to give
up outlying bits in order to concentrate on consolidating their
rule in the contiguous areas. Instead, wars, uprisings, and the
i. For an extensive and wonderfully useful discussion of models in the social
sciences, see Lave and March (1975).

spread of nationalism led to the consolidation of contiguous
states that were relatively large (compared to what preceded
them) at the expense of smaller and more scattered ones. In
other words, even though rulers may not have consciously sought
to limit their domains to contiguous areas, competition among
them eliminated noncontiguous areas, which were much more
difficult to defend militarily, and allowed the rulers of large con-
tiguous areas to consolidate their territorial claims at the expense
of others'.
The two models described here can be applied using only
words. There are many others that usually need to be expressed
mathematically or graphically because the processes they exam-
ine are too complicated to be captured easily by words alone.
Widely used models include divide-the-dollar games, which illu-
minate how different rules and time horizons affect the outcome
of bargaining over distribution; signaling models, which describe
the effect of costly symbolic actions on the perceptions of others;
information cascades, which describe the diffusion of changes in
information or perception of risk; spatial models of preferences,
used to think about voting behavior, policy choice by legislators,
and lots of other issues; prospect theory, which models the effect
of prior gains and losses on risk aversion; and contagion models,
which can be used to think about anything from the diffusion of
technological innovation to the spread of religious fundamental-
ism. The internal logic of these models is too complicated to be
fully and simply articulated in words. In such arguments, equa-
tions and graphical representations are used in addition to verbal
descriptions as a way of making all aspects of the logic precise
and clear.
Even if the student has no interest in becoming proficient in
the use of such models, exposure to them enriches the theoretical
imagination. It improves the quality of our speculations, which
are, in the words of Charles Lave and James March (1975, 2),
"the soul of social science."
A form of hard work that seems to me much less likely to
fertilize the soil in which the imagination may grow is the kind of
reading that is often considered preparation for qualifying ex-
ams. Being able to read the introductions and conclusions of
"great books" in order to summarize the main argument in a few
sentences is a skill in its own right, a skill often rewarded in
graduate school. But it does not seem to be correlated with the
ability to do imaginative research.

35
When one reads, whether in preparation for qualifying exams
or not, one should ponder and even brood over the discussions of
why one thing causes another. This, not the simple identification
of cause and effect, is the crux of a work of scholarship, and the
reader needs to think about whether it rings true, whether it fits
with what he thinks he already knows about the world. If indi-
viduals are not the unit of analysis in the argument, it is very
useful to think through which individuals would have to be moti-
vated, in what way, and to do what in order for the argument to
hold. If individuals are the main actors in the argument, it is
useful to ask oneself whether the motivations implied by the
argument seem to be plausible accounts of how, on average,
people behave.
Readers should also scrutinize the evidence the author offers
to support the argument. They should never accept an author's
assertion that evidence supports the claims made without looking
at the evidence and thinking about it. One cannot assess the
evidence supporting arguments without reading the middle parts
of books. If one does not have time to read everything one
should-and one never does-it is better to read carefully what
one can of the evidence than to read only the introduction and
conclusion for a summary of the argument.
Although it is all-important to absorb both information about
the world and models of how information can be organized and
interpreted, this is not enough. Scholars must also constantly,
though often implicitly, ask themselves the question, What do I
think? Do I believe this? Students cannot develop an autono-
mous reaction to the world by constantly worrying about what
others think. They must worry about what they think them-
selves, and make sure they think something. The vocation of
science is not for the other-directed. The gradual accretion of
thoughts entertained in response to information and models will
be the basis of one's own creative ideas and scientifically impor-
tant discoveries.
The Mentor's Role

I turn now to the delicate subject of mentors. Having an appren-
tice relationship with an experienced scholar can be a very useful
training experience. The student can learn how a seasoned scholar
approaches intellectual puzzles and how to make practical use of
the statistical and modeling tools acquired in classes. Typically, an

experienced researcher has figured out, stumbled on, and bor-
rowed lots of tricks and efficiencies over the years that can be
passed on to students. The student also gains professional social-
ization and sometimes a leg up in the job market via coauthored
publications. These are the advantages of a close mentoring rela-
tionship, and they are very substantial.
The mentoring relationship can be intellectually seductive to
the student, however. Graduate students, like the peasants de-
scribed by James Scott (1976), feel powerless in an unpredictable
world. Among other survival strategies, students often attempt
to cultivate patron-client relationships with faculty members,
who they hope can protect them from the various hazardous
forces of nature they face.2 In this environment of situationally
induced dependence, students may become so imbued with the
mentor's worldview and research project that they dismiss evi-
dence that conflicts with the mentor's arguments. Students may
even experience something akin to hostage syndrome, in which
they come to identify completely with the mentor's point of view,
feeling that all the adviser's opponents and all other ways of
thinking are wrongheaded or even contemptible. Such narrow-
minded partisanship is a rather common but perverse result of
the mentoring relationship. Students should guard against it, and
mentors should make all possible efforts to limit students' natu-
ral impulse toward partisanship. When students rely so heavily
on the mentor, they may be unable to conceive of research proj-
ects other than subsets of the mentor's research.
Advisers may, through inertia or inattention, seem to want
students to defer to all their ideas, but what good advisers really
want is for their students to be unafraid to challenge them in
sophisticated and well-informed ways. The best scholars are not
the best research assistants in graduate school, but rather those
who challenge, extend, and go beyond their teachers, and good
advisers know that.
By the dissertation stage, a student should be perched on the
mentor's shoulder, having absorbed what the mentor has to teach
and poised to take off in independent flight. He should not be

huddled under the mentor's protective wing. It is part of the men-
tor's job to push reluctant fledglings out of the nest if necessary.
Just as young people in the West do not allow their parents to
2. Students also make use of the "weapons of the weak" noted by Scott - gossip,
slander, ostracism, and shirking - to punish the village notables who fail to perform
their allotted roles in the departmental moral economy.

37
choose mates for them, students should not allow advisers to
choose their dissertation topics. They should listen carefully to
the adviser's advice, as one listens to parental advice, but ulti-
mately the scholar must feel an intense fascination in order to
sustain the commitment needed for such a massive research en-
deavor. The average comparativist lives with a dissertation topic
for between eight and twenty years, from starting to think about
it to publication of the dissertation-book and possible spin-offs
and extensions. That is as long as many marriages last. Many
comparativists continue working on their dissertation subject for
the rest of their careers. No one but the person who will be
putting in this massive amount of time and effort is really quali-
fied to choose the subject.
Romantic Questions, Reliable Answers
Having allowed passion, fascination, or indignation to influence
the choice of topic, the researcher then faces a very different
kind of task: devising a research strategy. Many of the classic
works in the comparative field focus on big, romantic questions,
and the same kinds of questions draw many into the field. The
choice of a strategy for investigating such topics requires methodi-
cal thought as well as romantic attraction. Outcomes such as
democratization, the collapse of empires, and revolution result
from the convergence of a number of different processes, some
of which may occur independently of others. Insufficient atten-
tion to research strategy when approaching such big questions
accounts for quite a few sand castles.
Because the complex outcomes are rare and undertheorized,
inductive research strategies prevail. Either researchers immerse
themselves in the history and social structure of a few cases that
have experienced the outcome of interest and come up with a list
of events and characteristics that predate the outcome, or they
cull indicators of potential causes from large public data sets and
plop them into statistical models. Thus, the implicit or explicit
model of explanation, even for those who reject quantitative
research, turns out to be a kitchen-sink regression. But correla-

tion is not causation, even in nonquantitative research.
At its best, this unstructured inductive approach to investigat-
ing complex social outcomes is analogous to that of medical re-
searchers who try to understand the onset of cancer by amassing
data on all the dietary and environmental factors that correlate

with an increased incidence of the disease. These studies are
useful. They lead to the accumulation of hypotheses, some of
which are ultimately confirmed and some not. "But though this
sort of fact-collecting has been essential to the origin of many
significant sciences," Thomas Kuhn notes that anyone who exam-
ines famous instances of pretheoretic work "will discover that it
produces a morass" (1970, I16). It does not by itself lead to an
understanding of the process through which cancer develops. For
that, researchers have had to step back from the aggregate out-
come, the diseased person, and focus instead on basic mecha-
nisms - for example, the factors that regulate cell division and
death. They must concentrate on the units within which the pro-
cess occurs (the cell and the gene) rather than on the outcome
(the diseased organism).
In a similar manner, students of comparative politics need to
seek to understand underlying political processes rather than to
"explain," in the sense of identifying the correlates of, complex
outcomes. What I am proposing here bears a resemblance to the
research strategy that Robert Bates et al. have called analytic
narratives. I concur with their belief that we need to
seek to locate and explore particular mechanisms that shape
the interplay between strategic actors and that thereby gen-
erate outcomes. [We need to] focus on the mechanisms that
translate such macrohistorical forces into specific political
outcomes. By isolating and unpacking such mechanisms,
analytic narratives thus contribute to structural accounts.
(1998, I2-I3)
In order to unpack these mechanisms, we need to focus on the
fundamental unit of politics, in most cases individuals. We need
to break up the traditional big questions into more precisely
defined questions about what individuals do in specific situations
that recur often enough to support generalizations about them. I
depart from Bates et al., however, in that I see "analytic narra-
tives" as an essential part of the research enterprise, but not its
end product. A carefully constructed explanatory argument built
up from fundamentals usually has multiple implications, at least

some of which are testable. The research effort is not complete
until empirical tests have shown that implications drawn from the
argument are consistent with reality.
Figuring out the implications of an argument involves repeat-

39
edly asking, "If this argument were true, what would I see in the
real world?" Some scholars seem impelled by intuition to engage
in this kind of reasoning, but anyone can train himself to do it as
part of a regular routine. To demonstrate deriving implications
from an argument, let us use Barrington Moore's famous apho-
rism "no bourgeois, no democracy"3 (1966, 418) as a simple
example. Since there are no contemporary societies that are liter-
ally without a bourgeoisie, and since the aphorism is stated in
absolutes but the world is probabilistic, it can be restated in
social sciencese as: "The likelihood of democracy increases once
the size of the bourgeoisie has passed a certain threshold." If
bourgeois is taken to refer to the commercial and industrial bour-
geoisie but not government bureaucrats, the implications of this
argument include the following:
* Democracies would not be expected to occur before the
industrial and commercial revolutions.
* The establishment of democracies would be expected
first in the countries that industrialized first.
* In the contemporary world, democracy would be more
likely in more industrialized countries.
* Democracy would be less likely in countries in which
wealth comes mainly from the export of mineral re-
sources (because comparative advantage might be ex-
pected to reduce industrial investment).
* The likelihood of democracy would decline as state own-
ership of economic resources rose.
* Democracy would be less likely in countries in which
foreigners or pariah capitalists excluded from the politi-
cal community own most enterprises.
The point of this rather simpleminded exercise is that to test
the famous aphorism, one need not count the members of the
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie in each country and then
correlate the count with the Freedom House democracy scale.
Instead of, or in addition to, a direct test of an argument, one can
figure out some of its observable implications and test them.

Some of the implications of any argument will be consistent with
more than one theory, but if enough implications can be drawn,
3. This academic sound bite is Moore's summary of Marx, not of his own argu-
ment. It is useful in the current context because it is so simple, not because it captures
Moore's argument.
not all will be consistent with both the proposed argument and
the same rival hypothesis. Although one cannot test all argu-
ments and cannot always reject alternative interpretations for
given sets of findings, one can, through tests of multiple implica-
tions, build support for a particular causal explanation one brick
at a time.
If instead of the aphorism-which is itself an assertion about a
correlation-I had used an argument that, like those advocated
by Bates et al., showed the moving parts in the causal mecha-
nism, the number of implications would have been multiplied.
Implications can be drawn from every link in the logical chain,
not just from the hypothesized relationship between initial cause
and final effect. Big, romantic, untestable ideas can be made
amenable to rigorous investigation by first breaking them up into
their component processes and then theorizing these processes
one at a time. In the example below, I demonstrate drawing
implications from causal mechanisms.
Breaking up the traditional big questions of comparative poli-
tics into the processes that contribute to them would make pos-
sible the construction and testing of theories. I would not label
this shift in the focus of analysis as a move from grand to mid-
range theory. A persuasive theory, backed by solid evidence,
about one of the several processes that combine to lead to a
transformational outcome strikes me as very grand indeed.
An Example of Breaking Up a Big Question
into Processes
Abstract methodological prescriptions are rarely compelling or
even fully intelligible. In an effort to move from the abstract to the
concrete and thus make a more persuasive argument for a change
in research strategy, the rest of this chapter focuses on transitions
from authoritarianism as an extended illustration of both the prob-
lems associated with big questions and the usefulness of disaggre-
gation into multiple processes as a research strategy. It will also
demonstrate the leverage that very simple models can bring to
bear on a question and show the usefulness of collecting a large
mass of information about a subject.

When we read research results in books and journals, we usu-
ally see only the finished product reporting the encounter be-
tween argument and evidence. Often, however, the most diffi-
cult part of research comes before any evidence is collected,

41
during the stage when the analyst has to figure out how to think
about the problem in a fruitful way. This example goes through
those initial steps in considerable detail.
I chose transitions as an example because of its normative and
academic importance. During recent decades, the last authoritar-
ian holdouts in capitalist Europe, nearly all countries in Latin
America and Eastern Europe, and some countries in Asia and
Africa have democratized. At the beginning of 1974, the year
identified by Samuel Huntington (1991) as the start of the "third
wave" of democratization, dictatorships of one kind or another
governed 8o countries.4 Only 15 of these dictatorships still sur-
vived at the end of 2000. During these years, 93 authoritarian
regimes collapsed (some countries endured more than one dicta-
torship during the period). These transitions had resulted in 4o
democracies that survived at the end of 2000, some quite flawed
but many stable and broadly competitive; 9 democracies that
lasted only a short time before being overthrown in their turn;
and 35 new authoritarian regimes, 15 of which lasted into the new
millennium.5 No one knows if these will be the last transitions for
these countries, but so far, contrary to initial expectations, new
democracies have proved fairly resilient. The study of these transi-
tions has become a major focus of scholarly attention.
Some of the finest minds in comparative politics have worked
on this subject. The body of literature on transitions now includes
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of case studies of particular transi-
tions, dozens of comparisons among small numbers of cases, and
at least half a dozen important efforts at theoretically informed
generalizations. A number of descriptive generalizations have
become rather widely accepted. One example is the observation
that "there is no transition whose beginning is not the conse-
quence - direct or indirect - of important divisions within the au-
thoritarian regime itself" (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 19); a
second is that pacts between competing elites facilitate the success-
ful transition to democracy (Karl 1986, 1990; Higley and Gunther
1992).
4. Figures here and elsewhere in this chapter are drawn from a data set I have
collected that includes all authoritarian regimes (except monarchies) lasting three
years or more, in existence at any time since 1946, in countries with a million or
more inhabitants. If monarchies and countries with less than a million inhabitants
were included, the number of authoritarian regimes would be larger. See Geddes
(1999a) for more details about the data set.
5. Outcome numbers exclude regimes in countries created as a result of border
changes during transitions, thus they do not sum to 93.

These and similar inductive generalizations emerging from
studies of particular groups of countries have added to our fac-
tual knowledge, and they have forced the abandonment of some
dearly held preconceptions. These are important advances. Nev-
ertheless, despite the passage of more than twenty-five years
since the current wave of democratization began and the sacrifice
of whole forests to the production of literature on the subject,
few new theories of democratization have been created. When
fine scholars - several of whom have in the past constructed theo-
ries of great elegance and plausibility - seem to have backed
away from theorizing about this topic, it behooves us to think
about why.
A part of the difficulty, I believe, stems from certain common
choices about research design. Of the fifty-six volumes on transi-
tions reviewed in the American Political Science Review between
1985 and 1995, thirty-one were studies of single countries, and
many of the others were edited volumes made up of individual
case studies of several countries but lacking a theoretical synthesis
of the different experiences. In nearly all these books, the cases
were selected on the dependent variable; that is, authors sought
to explain one or more cases of political liberalization or democra-
tization without comparing them to cases in which change had
failed to occur. Many of these studies supply readers with valu-
able factual information, but the research design chosen prevents
their authors from testing their theoretical claims.
Furthermore, in the majority of the studies, the outcome of
interest (liberalization, transition, or consolidation) had not yet
finished happening when the study was written. The desire of
authors to write about the most important political events of the
time, and of publishers to publish things at the peak of interest in
them, is understandable. This rush to publish, however, has dev-
astating effects on the accumulation of theoretical knowledge.
There is no way to test causal arguments if the outcome being
explained has not yet happened at the time the study is done.
Becoming embroiled in controversies over the causes of some-
thing that has not happened is like arguing about what the angels
dancing on the head of a pin look like without first having made
sure that at least one angel really performs there.
These would be short-term problems, with theories emerging
over time, if analysts continued working on the same problems
after the outcomes had become clear and if readers treated very
tentative conclusions with appropriate skepticism, but most do

43
not. Around the time it became clear that transitions to democ-
racy really had occurred in a large number of countries, many
scholars shifted their attention to trying to explain the consolida-
tion of democracy, which of course had not yet happened. Inter-
est in transitions declined at precisely the time when enough
experience had accumulated to make theory building possible.
The rush to publish is not unique to the study of regime
change, of course, and thus cannot carry all the blame for its
modest generation of theory. A further cause, I suggest, arises
from the choice of a compound outcome - that is, an outcome
that results from the confluence of multiple causal processes - as
the object of study, while maintaining an approach more suited to
simple outcomes.
To show exactly what I mean, in the pages that follow I de-
velop a concrete research strategy that begins with the disaggre-
gation of the big question-why democratization occurs-into a
series of more researchable questions about mechanisms. The
second step is a theorization of the specific process chosen for
study - in this case, the internal authoritarian politics that some-
times lead to transition. The third step is the articulation of
testable implications derived from the theorization. Decisions
about the domains of different testable implications constitute
the fourth step. The fifth is the actual discovery or collection of
evidence on which to test the implications; the sixth is the testing
itself; and the seventh is the interpretation of and response to
test results.
What I am aiming for here, and in other examples in this
book, is the self-conscious articulation of steps in the research
process that, like the values discussed above, occur in the prac-
tice of good scholarship but are rarely described in detail. At
various points, I shall step back from the description of the steps
involved in setting up the research question to comment on why I
made certain decisions, to mention where ideas came from, or to
reiterate methodological points. The example in this chapter em-
phasizes steps one through three as outlined in the previous para-

graph, leaving detailed discussion of issues involved in testing to
later chapters.
Theory-Based Disaggregation
The first issue that confronts the researcher attempting to follow
the research strategy suggested here is figuring out how to

disaggregate the processes leading to the compound outcome.
There will always be multiple ways to do this, some more fruitful
than others. The only general advice that can be given is that the
disaggregation should be based on theoretical intuition and that
more than one should be tried. The paragraphs below sketch an
example of the process involved based on my theoretical intu-
itions and fairly wide reading about transitions. Another ob-
server's intuitions might be different and at least equally useful.
The Intuition
A regime transition is a change in the basic institutions that
determine who will rule, how rulers will be chosen, and how
basic distributive decisions will be made. When such a change in
institutions occurs as a result of revolution or violent seizure of
power, a standard way of simplifying reality for the purpose of
theory building is to focus attention on the winning and losing
groups in the power struggle, assuming implicitly that institutions
chosen will reflect the interests of the winners and that any bar-
gaining that occurs over institutions is bargaining over details
among winners. Then, to explain such regime changes, we try to
understand why groups concluded that the old regime had be-
come intolerable and how they developed the organizational
strength and popular support needed to overthrow it.
Our intuitions about regime change in general seem to derive
from observing such forcible seizures of power, but these are not,
as it happens, very useful for understanding most transitions to
democracy. The breakdown of an authoritarian regime need not
lead to democratization, but when it does, the transition involves
bargaining and negotiation. Unlike revolutionary victories and
authoritarian seizures of power, transitions to more participatory
forms of government cannot be accomplished entirely by force,
and the institutions that emerge during such transitions reflect
compromises among groups, not domination by a single group.
Even when the authoritarian regime is overthrown by the mili-
tary, bargaining is necessary in order to complete the transition
to democracy. No single group wins and imposes its institutional
choices on all others. Furthermore, this bargaining occurs over a

period of time, during which the identity of particular negotia-
tors can change. Institutional changes may be accomplished in
increments. It is only at the end of the process that the observer
can look at the set of institutional changes and make a judgment

45
about whether democratization has occurred. In short, bargain-
ing over institutions is a central feature of regime change.
Several different processes can affect this bargaining. Political
competition and rivalry within the authoritarian elite can cause
splits that may increase the willingness of factions to bargain, as
Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986) have noted.
Members of the upper class who had initially benefited from re-
gime policies may become critical of later policies or performance
and may withdraw their support and their investments, thereby
destabilizing the economy and the regime. Economic crisis or
some other disaster may push ordinary citizens into clamorous
opposition, despite its risks. Such societal changes can strengthen
opposition bargainers and weaken elites. Changes in the interna-
tional economy or the influence of powerful neighbors may alter
the cost-benefit calculations of both leaders and led about the
feasibility of regime change. Not all these processes will be salient
in every transition, but often several of them are. They may inter-
act with each other, but they may also be independent.
The theoretical disaggregation that begins the research strat-
egy should focus on such possibly independent processes identi-
fied by the researcher. The disaggregation I suggest places the
bargaining over institutions at the center of analysis and seeks to
explain how these processes affected bargaining among different
actors at different times during the transition.
The Topics
With these ideas in mind, a possible set of topics would include
the following:
i. The politics within authoritarian governments, that is,
how political rivalries, policy disagreements, and bar-
gaining within different kinds of authoritarian regimes
affect the incentives of authoritarian rulers to liberalize6
6. Except for discussions of hard-liners and soft-liners who cannot be identified a
priori (e.g., Przeworski 1992), this is a topic that received little attention in the early
analyses of regime change. Przeworski (1991) has even asserted that characteristics of
the old regime do not affect outcomes in the new one. Remmer (1989) and Bratton
and van de Walle (1994, 1997), however, have argued that different kinds of authori-
tarian regimes dissolve in characteristically different ways, which has consequences
both for the likelihood of transition and for the kind of regime likely to emerge as a
result. For a review of some of these issues, see Snyder and Mahoney (1999).
2. The determinants of upper-class support for authoritar-
ian rule and the effects of loss of such support on bar-
gaining between government and opposition, and
hence on regime maintenance?
3. The causes and risks of mass expressions of discontent
and the influence of mass mobilization on bargaining
between government and opposition8
4. The effect of the relationship between opposition
elites and masses on bargaining between government
and opposition9
5. The relationship among (a) the timing of institutional
choices, (b) the interests of the bargainers at particular
times, and (c) extent of democratizationIo
6. The relationship between economic modernization and
citizen influence on regime choice"
7. The effect of international economic and geopolitical
shocks on the decisions and actions of regime leaders,
regime supporters, and ordinary citizens
7. Many case studies note the fickleness and ingratitude of bourgeois and other
upper-class supporters of authoritarian regimes, along with the role these groups
have played in opposition to authoritarian governments. Cardoso's study (1986) of
the Brazilian bourgeoisie during democratization is one of the earliest and most
insightful.
8. Many case studies describe the effect of demonstrations and other mass ac-
tions on the decisions of authoritarian rulers. In addition, several authors have em-
phasized the importance of popular opposition in bringing about transitions (e.g.,
Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Casper and Taylor 1996; Collier 1999; Collier and
Mahoney 1997; Bermeo 1997). These studies are largely descriptive, however.
Though initial theoretical steps have been taken from several different directions to
account for why large numbers of people, after having suffered oppression and
poverty for long periods of time, suddenly rise up to voice their indignation
(Przeworski 1986; Geddes and Zaller 1989; Lohmann 1994), much more work re-
mains to be done. Furthermore, to my knowledge, no one has offered a compelling
explanation of why authoritarian regimes sometimes respond with coercion to mass
protests and at other times hasten to compromise.
9. It should be possible to extend work on nested games (Tsebelis 1990) to deal

with this subject, though adaptation will be required to accommodate the institu-
tional fluidity characteristic of transitions.
i0. Much of the work on this subject has focused on pacts (e.g., Higley and
Gunther 1992; Karl 1986, 1990). This topic has only begun to be more fully and
systematically explored (e.g., Przeworski 1991; Geddes 1995, 1996; Mainwaring
1994).
I I. The correlation between economic development and democracy is one of the
best established in comparative politics (Bollen 1979; Bollen and Jackman 1985;
Przeworski et al. 2000; Burkhart and Lewis-Beck 1994; Barro 1999). The causes of
this relationship, however, continue to be debated.

47
Though different researchers would break up the big question in
different ways, any disaggregation into constituent processes
should have some of the characteristics of the topics on this list.
Each topic is posed as a general comparative question. We would
hesitate to propose an argument about any of these topics based
on the experience of only one country. Research on these topics
seems, on the contrary, to demand comparison across cases.
None of these topics imply selection bias, that is, none imply
limiting studies to those countries that have completed transi-
tions. All governments face opposition, and the absence of bar-
gaining in particular times and places requires explanation; it is
not a reason to exclude cases from examination. I will return to
issues related to appropriate selection of cases in later chapters.
For now, the important thing to note is that each topic listed here
is worthy of a project in itself. When processes are described
separately in this way, it becomes clear why it might be difficult
to theorize transitions as a whole.
Some of these topics, especially 2 and 3, have received consider-
able attention in the case study literature. The next step in develop-
ing research strategies to investigate them would be to build theo-
ries that subsume and explain the observations made in the case
studies. In the extended example below, I examine the first topic,
to which somewhat less attention has been paid. I propose an
argument about the incentives facing leaders in different kinds of
authoritarianism that helps to explain, first, why some authoritar-
ian governments initiate liberalization when they face little soci-
etal pressure to do so; and, second, why and when the factions that
always exist within dictatorships may contribute to democratiza-
tion. This argument thus offers an explanation for two elements in
the process of regime change that a number of studies note with-
out explaining, but it does not try to account for the final outcome
of democratization itself.
A Theorization of One Process: Politics in
Authoritarian Regimes
O'Donnell and Schmitter's observation (1986) about the im-

portance of splits within authoritarian governments, noted
above, alerts us to the importance of individuals near the center
of power during the transition process. Although political fac-
tions and disagreements can be found within any authoritarian


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﻿CHAPTER 2

Big Questions, Little Answers

How the Questions You Choose Affect

the Answers You Get

For the scholar who wants to contribute to the accumulation of

knowledge, the first step in the process is choosing a question to

investigate. This chapter makes some suggestions about how to

shape research questions to increase the likelihood that they will

ter is an attempt to articulate some of the values and emotions

that I believe motivate good scholars. These values and emotions

undergird much research, but they are rarely expressed. On the

contrary, the advice given to beginning scholars often implies the

opposite values. Here I discuss the role of curiosity, indignation,

and passion in the selection and framing of research topics.

In the second and much longer part of the chapter, I suggest a

transforming subjects that comparativists often choose to study.

Large-scale phenomena such as democratic breakdown, eco-

nomic development, democratization, economic liberalization,

and revolution result from the convergence of a number of differ-

ent processes, some of which occur independently from others.

No simple theory is likely to explain such compound outcomes.

In principle, a complex, multifaceted theory might successfully

do so, but in practice the task of constructing such theories has

daunted most analysts. I propose changing the way we approach

these questions. Instead of trying to "explain" such compound

outcomes as wholes, I suggest a focus on the various processes

that contribute to the final outcome, with the goal of theorizing

these processes individually and generating testable propositions

about them. In contrast to much of the methodological advice

given in this book, the suggestions in this chapter do not derive

from the logic of quantitative research. I cannot make any claim

that this research strategy is more "correct" than any other. My

argument rests, rather, on the judgment that it is a more effective

route to an accumulation of theoretical knowledge. The proof of

the pudding is in the eating, however, and until we have some

pudding, we cannot taste it. The last part of the chapter is an

extended example of how to break up a big question into multi-

implications of the theory thus devised.

"Science as a Vocation," Not Just a Job: Choosing a

Students are often advised to choose research topics by looking

for holes in the literature or by reading the ads in the Personnel

Newsletter of the American Political Science Association to see

search for research topics can and perhaps should be methodi-

cal and instrumental. This impression is false, and the advice,

if followed, leads to a number of perversities: taking The Lit-

erature seriously whether it merits it or not; the selection of a

topic that will become outdated before the dissertation is done;

Curiosity, fascination, and indignation should guide the choice

of research topic. Emotion has been banned from most of the

research enterprise, and properly so. But one place it should

remain is in the choosing of research topics. The standard advice

on how to choose a topic leaves out the role of such emotions as

commitment, irritation, and obsession.

An especially thoughtful version of the standard advice is ar-

ticulated by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba

tant in the world and that contribute to an identifiable scholarly

literature. Beginning scholars are advised to:

i. Choose a hypothesis seen as important by scholars in

the literature but for which no one has completed a

2. Choose a hypothesis in the literature that we suspect is

CHAPTER 2