From Old Thinking to New Thinking in Qualitative Research

Robert English has provided a strongly written critique of our article "Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War." ¹ Unfortunately, his reply may have the unintended consequence of reinforcing a pernicious but popular view among political scientists that qualitative research—especially on single cases—cannot generate progress. Here we have a case of seminal importance that has attracted the sustained attention of dozens of international relations scholars for more than a decade, and yet it appears that scholars are still involved in what looks like an interminable historians' debate over causes. In this article we show that such a reaction would be utterly unjustified.

We have two basic responses. First, much of English's critique misses the mark because it is based on a misunderstanding of our research design. Second, his reply is nonetheless a test of our major findings conducted by a skeptical and talented researcher. Our analysis passes this tough test, though English does advance some useful criticisms.

We proceed in four sections. First, we show that major progress has been made in explaining the end of the Cold War and establishing its theoretical implications. The debate now turns mainly on how to assess the causal implications of widely accepted findings, which is why issues of qualitative research design are so important. In the second section, we demonstrate the importance of moving beyond the framework of necessary and sufficient conditions toward a more probabilistic approach. Because it is constrained by the old framework, English's reply cannot directly engage much of our analysis. Third, we explain how we designed our research on this case to assess endogeneity. A failure to appreciate why and how we tackled this key issue is the source of English's serious—and wrong—charge that our research was "biased." The fourth section addresses English's most central empirical challenge concerning hard-line alternatives to Soviet retrenchment. In this case, as in so many others, arguments over possible alternatives to the course actually chosen are crucial and so rigor is at a premium.

The issues at stake here concern not just the end of the Cold War or even the study of ideas in international relations, but qualitative research more generally. None of the methodological challenges we highlight has a generally accepted answer in social science. ² In our article we sought to apply new thinking to these challenges. English's article shows that we were not entirely successful in articulating our method for accomplishing this goal. This symposium gives us a chance to do so.

Making Progress in Explaining the End of the Cold War

Ten years ago, the conventional wisdom held that Soviet material decline—often measured solely in terms of military capabilities—was small or nonexistent; that this factor consequently had little causal weight in the end of the Cold War; and thus that other variables, particularly ideational ones, carried the day. ³ A second wave of empirical scholarship that emerged in the mid-1990s shifted the conventional wisdom. At that time, most scholars agreed that Soviet material decline—measured more accurately in terms of overall capabilities—had actually been quite significant beginning in the early-to-mid 1980s and that it did play a significant causal role. ⁴ Still, the standard conclusion was that even though decline did prompt change in Soviet foreign policy, the resulting shift could have just as easily been toward aggression or a new version of muddling through (rather than retrenchment) and that other factors played the key role in resolving this uncertainty. ⁵

Though the tone of his article might lead readers to overlook it, English actually concurs with two of our most important findings—each of which differed sharply from the previous conventional wisdom. First, we found that the economic burden on the Soviet Union was far greater than the second wave of scholarship had realized. Three factors stand...