American Political Development and New Challenges of Causal Inference

Members of the subfield of American Political Development (APD), like other political scientists, are confronting the identification revolution in the social sciences. They are exploring whether and how evolving standards of causal inference can shape the research the subfield performs. Almost by definition, APD research involves analyzing observational data, where variation in the data is provided by “nature,” and thus faces the formidable challenges that follow from the inability of the researcher to manipulate the assignment of units of interest to treatment and control conditions. Fortunately, the very scope of historical analysis can create opportunities to take advantage of natural experiments and exogenous inputs that alter the course of events to produce more convincing causal analyses. Yet, historical investigation presents unique challenges to standard methodological approaches, certainly no less the case when causal identification is prioritized. Understanding and confronting these challenges are essential to taking advantage of inferential opportunities presented by historical data, as our consideration of scholarship on economic development demonstrates.