On January 18/19, I gave a workshop on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in Large-Scale Educational Assessment at the University of Oslo, Norway. The two-day workshop was organized by Associate Professor Nani Teig for members of the research group “Large-Scale Educational Assessment” (LEA) at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Besides providing a thorough introduction to QCA and its application in R, based on my QCA book, the workshop further engaged with published QCA examples from the field of education, to explore the specific requirements of research designs based on LEA data. Many thanks to Nani Teig and her colleagues for the kind invitation to freezing cold but beautiful Oslo!

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In December 2023, Chikura Publishing issued a Japanese edition of Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application, originally published by Georgetown University Press in 2021. The book was translated by Professors Nobukazu Azuma of Aoyama Gakuin University and Narimasa Yokoyama of Hosei University. Many thanks to the people at Georgetown University Press and Chikura Publishing for facilitating and implementing this translation. It was a pleasure to meet with everyone during my stay in Tokyo in May 2023. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Nobukazu Azuma and Narimasa Yokoyama for their thorough and timely work on the translation!

The book is available for orders on honto.jp, and amazon.co.jp, among others. More information about the book is available here (including open access online material). Japanese translations of the online material will also be made available through the publisher’s website.

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Against the backdrop of my recent Politics and Governance article “Zeitenwende: German Foreign Policy Change in the Wake of Russia’s War against Ukraine” I was interviewed for an episode of the Let’s Talk About podcast series by Cogitatio Press. The episode was moderated by Rodrigo Silva. The video is available on YouTube. The publisher’s website also features an audio version. In the interview I speak about the main findings of my research on German foreign policy, which indicate that the country has undergone an international orientation change, based on Chuck Hermann’s criteria for this classic concept of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). That said, due to the ongoing and incomplete nature of the policy processes (and domestic decisions, including the recent constitutional ruling on the federal budget), it is uncertain whether the initiated changes will be permanently implemented.

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I contributed a book chapter to The Handbook of Teaching Qualitative and Mixed Research Methods: A Step-by-Step Guide for Instructors, co-edited by Alissa Ruth, Amber Wutich, and H. Russell Bernard and recently published by Routledge. My chapter, entitled “Uncovering Causal Complexity with Qualitative Comparative Analysis” provides material for instructors to teach causal complexity and QCA usage through a combination of interactive lectures, homework materials, and in-class discussions. Overall, the Handbook presents a collection of 71 concise chapters on qualitative and mixed methods, covering diverse topics such as research ethics, sampling techniques for qualitative research, visual and participatory methods, linguistic analysis, network analysis, and six chapters on modeling and comparative analyses, which include my QCA chapter and, among others, a chapter on comparative ethnography by Raul Pacheco-Vega and a chapter on effective calibration practices by Claude Rubinson and Roel Rutten. The complete contents and further information on the Handbook can be found here.

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On December 12-14, the QCA Paper Development Workshop and the QCA Expert Workshop took place in Antwerp at the Antwerp Management School (AMS), hosted by Bart Cambré (AMS) and Benoît Rihoux (UCLouvain) and the co-organizers of the Paper Development Workshop Julia Leib (Uni Leipzig), Christoph Niessen (Universiteit Leiden), and Christian Rupietta (Queen’s University Belfast). The workshops brought together a group of about 50 experts and practitioners from around the globe to discuss methodological innovations and empirical applications. Together with Benoît Rihoux, I co-chaired a paper development roundtable, where we discussed and commented upon four empirical applications.

Politics and Governance published the open access article “Zeitenwende: German Foreign Policy Change in the Wake of Russia’s War Against Ukraine” as an ahead-of-print. In the article, I examine the foreign and security policy of the German ‘traffic-light’ coalition under Chancellor Scholz to assess whether and to which extent the Russian aggression against Ukraine has marked an international orientation change in German foreign and security policy (see abstract below). The article is part of a forthcoming special issue “From Kabul to Kyiv: The Crisis of Liberal Interventionism and the Return of War”, co-edited by Cornelia Baciu (University of Copenhagen), Falk Ostermann (Kiel University), and Wolfgang Wagner (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and based on an authors’ workshop at the University of Copenhagen.

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Abstract: Russia’s war against Ukraine has severely damaged the European security architecture. This article examines the consequences of this rupture for German foreign and security policy. Just a few months before Russia’s full‐scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany saw the transition to an unprecedented three‐party coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals. In a special address to the Bundestag three days after the invasion, Chancellor Olaf Scholz described Russia’s war initiation as a historical Zeitenwende (“watershed”) that called into question long‐held beliefs about European security. In the wake of this, Scholz proclaimed far‐reaching changes, including the announcement that military expenditure would be drastically increased, additional military capabilities would be procured, and new deployments would be committed to NATO’s eastern flank. This article argues that the Zeitenwende amounts to an international orientation change in German foreign and security policy. Apart from identifying areas of significant change, the article also documents political contestation over the Zeitenwende’s nature and extent as well as gaps between proclaimed changes and actual implementation.

Am 12./13. Oktober habe ich an der Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken einen QCA-Workshop für das CEUS-Nachwuchskolleg am Cluster für Europaforschung gehalten. In dem kompakten zweitägigen Format wurden die Grundlagen von QCA auf Basis von Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application erörtert, Anwendungsbeispiele besprochen und die Anwendung der Software anhand des kürzlich aktualisierten R Manual for QCA vorgestellt. Herzlichen Dank an Prof. Dr. Georg Wenzelburger und das Team der Professur für Politikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt komparative Europaforschung sowie an Dr. Florian Rossbach, Koordinator des Nachwuchskollegs Europa, für die Einladung nach Saarbrücken und an alle Teilnehmenden für den konstruktiven Workshop!

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The R Manual for QCA has been updated to version 3.0. Among other changes and updates, the current version includes further guidance on forming different types of intermediate solutions and on visualizing QCA results, particularly on how to create suitable XY plots and how to customize them in line with one’s own research aims. The R Manual for QCA (PDF file, R Script, and sample data) can be downloaded on this website and on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KYF7VJ.

The R Manual for QCA is freely available as an online appendix to Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021).

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I reviewed Richard Ned Lebow’s The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations: How Do We Know? (Cambridge University Press, 2022) for the latest issue of Political Science Quarterly. The book review is available here.

From the review: “In his book The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations, Richard Ned Lebow addresses foundational questions about the academic enterprise of international relations (IR). What counts as knowledge in the discipline? By which methods and approaches can it be pursued? And on which grounds can knowledge claims be made? These overarching questions structure Lebow’s survey, while the topics of individual chapters are approached from the divide between positivism and interpretivism. […]

Quest for Knowledge makes a plea for more conscious reflection upon questions of epistemology and the premises upon which our methodologies and methods rest. The book also acknowledges the diversity of approaches in IR, under the broad tents of positivism and interpretivism. As Lebow argues, the categories of positivism and interpretivism “do not exhaust the ways in which we can frame and seek knowledge but do capture nicely the dominant research traditions in international relations” (221). This resonates with a similar argument by Gary Goertz and James Mahoney, put forth in A Tale of Two Cultures, namely that empirical studies in the social sciences can be separated into quantitative and qualitative methodological cultures. However, as David Kuehn and Ingo Rohlfing have shown in a pilot study, methods practices could not be neatly classified into two cultures and, especially, qualitative research showed much more diversity than the common label suggests.

Although one may question whether the binary distinction between positivism and interpretivism accurately portrays the field of IR, this does not diminish the substantial contribution of Lebow’s book, which should be essential reading for doctoral students and more senior researchers alike. The Quest for Knowledge successfully lifts the scaffolding of IR research to interrogate what is often relegated to the sidelines or not discussed at all in books on research design and methods. Lebow disentangles prevailing conceptions of “cause” and he keenly identifies the analytical dilemmas that are inherent in the main research approaches. The discussion of four research strategies on how to deal with the challenges of causal analysis (190–97) is particularly enlightening.”

During the week of August 21-25, I returned to Lugano to teach the QCA workshop at the 27th Summer School in Social Science Methods at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). Since 2016, I have been teaching this workshop at USI. The intensive course covers the foundations and advanced uses of QCA and its application in R, based on my book Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021) and the accompanying R Manual (R Script and PDF freely available here). Workshop sessions are split into lectures and exercises, with dedicated time for individual consultation and feedback (see also the course description on the USI website). For impressions from previous years, see here. Thanks to the team at USI for the smooth organization and to all participants for the constructive sessions!

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