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Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on June 7, 2006
Political Analysis 2006 14(3):311-331; doi:10.1093/pan/mpj018
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Simple Multivariate Test for Asymmetric Hypotheses

William Roberts Clark

Department of Political Science and the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, ISR 4202 Box 1248, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248

Michael J. Gilligan

Department of Politics, New York University, 7th Floor, 726 Broadway, New York, NY 10003

Matt Golder

Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 531 Bellamy Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230

e-mail: wrclark{at}umich.edu (corresponding author)
e-mail: michael.gilligan{at}nyu.edu
e-mail: mgolder{at}fsu.edu

In this paper, we argue that claims of necessity and sufficiency involve a type of asymmetric causal claim that is useful in many social scientific contexts. Contrary to some qualitative researchers, we maintain that there is nothing about such asymmetries that should lead scholars to depart from standard social science practice. We take as given that deterministic and monocausal tests are inappropriate in the social world and demonstrate that standard multiplicative interaction models are up to the task of handling asymmetric causal claims in a multivariate, probabilistic manner. We illustrate our argument with examples from the empirical literature linking electoral institutions and party system size.


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