Brown Bag Seminar by Ulaş Erdoğdu (Northwestern University)
Nearly Realized Cases: A Novel Framework to Select Negative Cases for Comparative Theory Development
Selection of negative cases, where the outcome of interest does not occur, has important implications for theory development and is especially challenging for rare events. Whereas Mahoney and Goertz's (2004) possibility principle provides a framework for negative case selection for theory testing, we lack a similar framework for theory development. I introduce 'nearly realized cases': cases that lack only one constitutive dimension of the outcome. Unlike existing case selection frameworks, this strategy: 1) does not presuppose theoretical expectations, 2) is explicitly aimed at theory development, and 3) enables a novel form of counterfactual reasoning. This is the first framework to use the conceptual structure of the dependent variable for case selection. I show that some studies implicitly compare nearly realized cases to positive cases to generate new theories. This article broadly contributes to the literature on case selection/casing, selecting on the dependent variable, and theory development.