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Notes
The essential logic of ‘variable-oriented’ research, Ragin (Citation1987) argues, to formulate a single overall solution for each outcome observed and to follow an additive logic, discretely quantifying the explanatory contribution of each additional causal factor.
Møller takes variants of ‘patrimonial communism’ as promoting post-communism authoritarianism and ‘national-accommodative’ and ‘bureaucratic authoritarian’ communism as favouring democracy.
Schneider also reviews global patterns of consolidation of democracy, finding that many post-communist states consolidated rapidly despite little pre-transition liberalisation, while many successful South European cases experienced much slower consolidations.
Schneider also rejects the notion of democratic consolidation as the permanence or irreversibility of democracy to allow for degrees of consolidation.
Asymmetry of causes between an outcome and its non-occurrence—the fact, for example, that causes of non-democracy are not simply the reverse or absence of the causes of democracy—is one of the key forms of causal complexity highlighted by qualitative comparative analysis.
For researchers using qualitative comparative analysis the key problem is how to handle potentially large numbers of ‘logical remainders’ that the technique highlights—logically possible configurations of factors for which there are no corresponding cases in the real world. For typological analysis, a multiplicity of configurations would create data-handling problems as it would be difficult to express visually.