It occurs to me that in political science, you can often (almost always?) break down attempts to explain why something happened into two categories:
1) Permissive conditions: why was it able to happen?
2) Catalyst: why did it happen when it did, and not some other time?
I think there are a non-trivial number of fights that happen in political science because two researchers don't realize that they have two different explanations which, because they fall on opposite sides of that fence, are not actually incompatible.
No comments:
Post a Comment