In recent years, the importance of mechanism-centered explanation has become an article
of faith within the social sciences, uniting researchers from a wide variety of methodological …

Political scientists largely agree that causal mechanisms are crucial to understanding
causation. Recent advances in qualitative and quantitative methodology suggest that causal …

This paper offers four main arguments about the nature of causation in the social sciences.
First, contrary to most recent work, I argue that there is a unitary conception of causation: a …

During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations have
received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of …

This article emphasizes various ways by which the study of mechanisms can make
quantitative research more useful for causal inference. It concentrates on three aspects of …

A widespread turn towards mechanism-centred explanations can be viewed across the
social sciences in recent decades. This article clarifies what it might mean in practical terms …

A substantial intellectual movement has been growing in the social sciences around the
adoption of mechanism-and process-based explanations as complements to variable-based …

Quantitative analysis of causal effects in political science has trended toward the adoption of
“causal empiricist” approaches. Such approaches place heavy emphasis on causal …

Good sociology takes history seriously. Good political sociology, however, takes more than
political history seriously. If political sociology is to escape from the cramped prison of the …

Amidst both philosophers of science and social scientists (including historians) one finds
people defending the thesis that explanations of particular facts should refer to proximate …