How can regression-type studies, which try to get causal inferences by controlling for variables until whatever is left is plausibly a causal relationship, benefit as much as possible from qualitative research? This chapter offers three qualitative research designs that can help test and improve quantitative causal inferences based on control variables. First, we consider process-tracing designs that seek to discover previously unknown confounding variables that can be added as new control variables, thereby refining and improving the statistical model. Second, we discuss process tracing that seeks to confirm that control variables have a direct connection to the outcome variable, and therefore are relevant controls. Third, we discuss process tracing to check whether control variables might be posttreatment and therefore at least partially harmful. Finally, we provide a demonstration of the kind of iterated interaction that we have in mind between statistical efforts at causal inference and qualitative research to learn more about the assumptions behind the model, involving the relationship between labor union strength and the prevalence of employment law across U.S. states.

How can mixed-method research add value to experiments? There is much to learn by adding qualitative components to experiments that can test for problems related to measurement; networks and spillover among experimental subjects; issues related to the meaning of treatments, outcomes, and other aspects of the experiment for participants; the exhaustiveness of the intended causal content of the treatment; and moderation effects related to subgroups of participants, or to differences across implementations of an experiment in divergent contexts. Some of these areas relate to the goal of theoretical generalization from the initial experiment, but most of them also have connections with the meaning and quality of the causal inference for the experiment at hand.

How can quantitative methods support case studies in general? One common task in case-study research is presenting audiences with a large collection of texts. Text-as-data methods may facilitate this task by summarizing the overall collection more quickly and understandably than we can usually do ourselves, and by locating individual documents within the collection. We offer an application, showing how text-as-data methods effectively summarize the large collection of legal documents available regarding defendants in cases related to the January 6th invasion and facilitate case-study exploration and understanding of specific individuals. We also discuss how mixed-method approaches may save time and resources as a way of moving across levels of analysis within a case-study design. We wind up the chapter by raising a note of caution regarding common attempts to use statistics as a test of generalizability for case studies and regarding the somewhat less common but still recurrent designs that mix game theory and qualitative research. Both of these approaches can work, and can offer insights, but both are harder than they may initially appear.

I begin Chapter 9 by situating the lessons from the Irish case study within a broader theoretical context. Although there are particularities to all case studies, theoretical frameworks can be developed from in-depth investigations in specific contexts. In this chapter, I explore the relevance of the moral psychology of fairness and feelings of relative deprivation across several other case studies: in the United States, Sudan, Chile, France, and during the Arab Spring in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Economic inequalities across multiple global regions are a key explanation for civic unrest, feelings of unfairness, and attempts at radical social change. The rise of populism and authoritarian leaders is the subject of the following chapter.

This chapter describes a number of case studies relating to both financial and non-financial institutions.

This chapter explores developments after standards for pre-project consultation were raised in 2013. The six cases examined in this chapter, funded by multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region after heightened community engagement policies, were introduced underscore a number of key insights. The post-2013 cases broadly demonstrate a number of key improvements including greater rigour in consultation and diligence mechanisms, heightened precision in identifying issues of community concern, higher pre-project diligence and screening standards, ongoing environmental and technical monitoring, the presence of locally trained mediators, skill development for consultation participants, and a longer-term view of community welfare and responsive grievance remedies. Shortcomings persisted in some cases, including instances of duress, lack of information disclosure, fraud, limited access to consultation mechanisms and environmental harm leading to project cessation in two cases when the adverse social impacts were seen to outweigh potential benefits. On the whole, corresponding with more rigorous community consultation and diligence standards, during this phase, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases brought to court declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50% compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices prior to 2013.

This chapter presents a series of six investor–community case studies in the Asia Pacific region during the pre-2013 period, during which pre-project community engagement and accountability on the part of infrastructure investment banks were relatively less stringent, in order to understand the impact of relatively relaxed community engagement standards on subsequent grievance claims. This set of six cases will be compared with a set of six cases presented in Chapter 6 after heightened diligence standards were introduced after 2013. The cases reviewed in this chapter were either sole financed projects by the World Bank/International Finance Corporation or collaborative projects with the Asian Development Bank and European Investment Bank in the Asia Pacific region. The sectors include investment in transport, the extractive industry and special economic zone development. The key finding of this chapter is that during this pre-2013 discretionary community consultation phase, most cases resulted in either full or partial project cancellation, delay, suspension, compensation for harms or transfer to local courts for resolution. A small portion were dismissed due to insufficient information. In total, of the six cases examined, four were cancelled or stalled, one proceeded to court litigation and one was closed. The cases highlight the risks of insufficient attention to community consultation.

The inspiration for this volume is Simon Deakin’s proposal to think of the corporation as a shared resource which is collectively held and managed for the benefit of multiple interests. A small but fascinating recent literature extended this insight to mutuals, cooperatives, and benefit corporations, while an independent literature applied a similar line of Ostromian thinking to inter alia cities, land trusts, civil society organization, and certain kinds of platforms. All these studies noted the importance of shared knowledge, but none deployed the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. What this volume attempts to do is to steer the discussion toward this unifying framework. This chapter introduces the contributions, which despite their diversity engage with the idea that corporations and ecosystems comprising corporate actors cohere around shared knowledge, values, and other kinds of intellectual or cognitive resources, the sustainable production and reproduction of which depends on specific practices and rule configurations.

Ocean acidification is a significant but under-recognised climate impact where oceans absorb CO2, leading to a 30–40 per cent decrease in pH since pre-industrial times. This poses a threat to marine ecosystems and food webs, as calcifying organisms such as oysters and corals struggle to build their shells, while non-calcifying species face behavioural changes. Despite an increasing amount of scientific literature, OA receives minimal attention from social sciences and lacks international governance. The book explores how OA should be governed, mapping the governance landscape as a regime complex involving multiple actors and instruments. It proposes global experimentalist governance as suitable for addressing the complexity of OA, examining case studies of the OA Alliance and the International Maritime Organization. The research finds that while OA is framed as a climate change effect needing holistic responses, including mitigation, adaptation, and resilience measures, current governance remains fragmented, with limited coordination among relevant international frameworks.

This conclusion synthesises the book’s findings on ocean acidification (OA) governance. The study demonstrates that OA is a complex problem spanning ocean, atmosphere, and land systems with varying temporal and spatial dimensions. The current governance landscape constitutes a regime complex involving multiple institutions across different issue areas. Global experimentalist governance emerges as the most suitable approach because it can accommodate OA’s complexity and build upon existing fragmented governance structures. Two case studies – the Ocean Acidification Alliance and International Maritime Organization – reveal partial implementation of experimentalist governance features but significant limitations. Both institutions struggle with setting specific metrics, systematic reporting, peer review, and feedback mechanisms essential for recursive learning. Key obstacles include scientific uncertainty making concrete targets difficult, institutional reluctance towards delegation and provisionality, and weak communication across governance levels. Despite incomplete realisation, experimentalist governance remains promising for OA because it provides necessary flexibility and adaptability. The book concludes that while current institutions show experimentalist features, full implementation requires addressing institutional apprehensions and developing stronger communicative infrastructures for effective multilevel coordination in tackling this emerging environmental challenge.

The challenge of finding appropriate tools for measurement validation is an abiding concern in political science. This chapter considers four traditions of validation, using examples from cross-national research on democracy: the levels-of-measurement approach, structural-equation modeling with latent variables, the pragmatic tradition, and the case-based method. Methodologists have sharply disputed the merits of alternative traditions. The chapter encourages scholars – and certainly analysts of democracy – to pay more attention to these disputes and to consider strengths and weaknesses in the validation tools they adopt. An appendix summarizes the evaluation of six democracy data sets from the perspective of alternative approaches to validation.

We describe the effect that terror has on international tourism flows. Studies yield very different results. We show in our survey that this is due to the perspective taken – specific single attacks versus the entire history of attacks in a country, selected countries versus a comprehensive set of countries – and the time frame under consideration. While high-profile attacks may have large impact effects, on average terror has mild effects that however may be relatively persistent. We survey the most important contributions and point out the relative strengths and difficulties that the different methodological approaches entail.

To demonstrate the generalizability of the theory beyond US–Soviet nuclear arms control, Chapter 5 examines three cases: the 1999 Lahore Declaration between India and Pakistan, the 1979 Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, and negotiations between the United States and Iran in 2009–2015. The India–Pakistan case reveals how political shifts can motivate states to hedge previously informal cooperation with low monitoring agreements. The Egypt–Israel and US–Iran cases demonstrate how uncertainty following leadership transitions and public demonstrations can lead highly adversarial states to take a risk on cooperation, but using agreements with intrusive verification measures. While other factors, including third-party mediation, relative power, and crises, also contributed to these outcomes, the evidence indicates that domestic political volatility had distinct effects on agreement timing and design. The findings challenge alternative explanations based on incremental trust-building and socialization. As the cases span different regions, time periods, and types of military competition, they validate the broader applicability of the book’s theoretical framework linking domestic political volatility and uncertainty to arms control agreement design.