Natural Experiments and Historical Social Science: The View from HPE

I consider the promise and pitfalls of using natural experiments to study American political development (APD) in light of lessons learned from historical political economy (HPE), where the “credibility revolution” has made significant inroads. I focus on the oft-expressed concern: will reliance on natural experiments prevent historically-oriented social scientists from asking “big” or theoretically important questions that may not be causally identified? With a brief intellectual history, I argue that in HPE natural experiments have proven perfectly compatible with answering major questions in the field and both deductive and inductive theory-building. The biggest problems have arisen from more practical issues of meta-science; I focus on tendencies to over-claim exogeneity and to understate uncertainty. I discuss how APD might fruitfully incorporate natural experiments into its methodological toolkit while avoiding some of these problems.