QCA and Fuzzy Set Applications to Social Movement Research

Abstract

Social scientists are drawn to the study of social movements and collective action because they represent significant departures from routine social life. A related feature that makes them an important object of inquiry is that the conditions for their realization are often conjunctural in nature. That is, for these phenomena to occur at all, a number of conditions typically must be met or satisfied in some way. It is useful to think of these conjunctures of conditions as “causal recipes.” To complicate matters a bit, there are often multiple recipes – different combinations of conditions – linked to the same general outcome. A central goal of research on social movements and collective action is to unravel the relevant causal recipes and to specify their various ingredients. This interest in studying the “causal recipes” linked to “qualitative outcomes” dovetails with key features of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). QCA builds on the logic of qualitative, case‐oriented research as it is practiced in comparative sociology and comparative politics. By formalizing the logic of this type of analysis, QCA makes it possible to bring some of the empirical intensity of qualitative approaches to studies that embrace more than a handful of cases.