Event Info This
paper identifies subnational peripheries as regions with historical
trajectories and social formations that differ from those the majority
of state’s territory, and that present distinct inferential challenges
to within-country comparative designs using the subnational comparative
method (Snyder 2001). These challenges are
directly interpretable using standard concepts in quantitative and
qualitative political methodology: unit heterogeneity, unobserved
heterogeneity, complex interactive causes, small-n problems, and
nonignorable missing data. The paper illustrate the stakes
of the argument for current practice using three questions for which
the subnational comparative method is ideally suited—local public goods
and economic development, identity and insurgency, and ethnic voting—in
the context of six Southeast Asian countries:
Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The discussion clarifies exactly how subnational peripheries complicate
causal inference through within-country comparisons, and shows how many
of the solutions to the problems raised by
subnational peripheries frequently change the causal parameter of
interest, or alternatively, the population being studied. These findings
have important implications for current practice.
Registration for this event has closed. |