The retrieval of political science as a “history of today” is indisputable. Both political scientists and IR scholars tend to rediscover contextual political analysis, integrating dimensions of time, space and discourse as a legitimate part of explanation. In the IR domain, where small-N designs are more of the rule than the exception, achievement of analytical rigor is under on-going scrutiny. This paper seeks to contribute to the contemporary methodological discussion turning around the “third way” of investigation, which seeks to incorporate historical narratives within abstract theorizing. The central objective of this paper is to give a roadmap on when, how, and to which degree of rigor a narrative shall be explored with the use of game-theoretic models. The original analytic narrative method and its critiques will first be reviewed. Next, will be the concentration on approaches to modeling in small-N case studies and their potential to advance the analytical rigor in qualitative social science research. Thus, it would appear that different cases appeal for distinguished applications of game-theoretic models: in their standard form, as an “open formula” or as a heuristic device. On the other hand, different takes on modeling open up the narratives in different ways, which is demonstrated on a concrete historical example. This paper concludes by showing that diminishing the span between the specificity of real world events and context-free propositions of the general theory stays an unsolved but promising area of our work.
