Abstract
This chapter outlines the utility for employing case study methodologies to provide sufficient external validity upon which to craft policy relevant to maintaining healthy democratic politics. The broader theoretical context is an investigation into the conditions that might structurally condition democracies to fail via democratic means. Venezuela’s democratic decline serves as the basis for the heuristic case study, wherein the objective is to identify the failures of the Venezuelan case in a larger framework that addresses the complexity of institutional design in democratic political systems states broadly. Cases are selected based upon the objective of the researcher, and similarly, the case study methodology chosen rests firmly on their research goals. Lastly, the chapter outlines the research design necessary for satisfying broader inquiry within the more modest approach to how heuristic case studies can be used to inform both theory and policy.
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Lincoln and Guba (1979) state that the terms “nomothetic” (meaning “based on law”) and “idiographic” (meaning “based on the particular individual”) come to the sciences from the German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband in an attempt to distinguish the natural sciences (“nomothetic”) from the social sciences (“idiographic”). The spirit of this binary opposite still operates in the background of people’s understanding of what is meant by the idea of the “sciences” as discussed above. In Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, “The Only Generalization Is: There Is No Generalization,” in Case Study Method: Key Issues, Key Texts, eds. Roger Gomm, Martyn Hammersley, and Peter Foster (London: Sage, 2000), 33.
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A strong case could be made that any new confirmation (and/or “infirmation”) does, in fact, create new claims by advancing knowledge. However, since new claims are not expressly the objective of these case study methods, they should be placed closer to the configurative end than the “crucial” end.
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Brown, C.M. (2018). Case-Driven Theory-Building in Comparative Democratization: The Heuristics of Venezuela’s “Democratic Purgatory”. In: Kachuyevski, A., Samuel, L. (eds) Doing Qualitative Research in Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72230-6_2
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