This proposed paper is part of a series of papers from the authors’ collaborative research project on Comparative Historical Analysis. Reflecting on the insights from their field-research in different substantive settings (authoritarian regime transitions in the Middle East, and state-building and nationalism in Western Europe), the authors trace the steps of how they reconciled the deductive goal of theory-testing with the inductive experience of theory-building that archival field-research brings. Their experience shows that a coherent macro-analytical narrative gradually emerges from an ‘iterative’ approach where theory and historical evidence interact. This contradicts the teachings of mainstream research methodology where causal theories are separate from the data. Influenced by the Popperian model of scientific falsification, the prevailing methodological ideal suggests that robust theories emerge when scholars deduce complete hypotheses and then discretely test them on cases. According to this model of scientific inquiry, using observed evidence to reconfigure one’s explanation in the middle of research is simply inductive ad hoccery. However, the popperian deductive logic is virtually impossible to implement in historical inquiry, because systematic causal theories can seldom be fully hypothesised in isolation of any evidence from cases. The authors find that relationships of causal complexity and temporal dynamics like path dependency often only emerge over time, when investigators gradually update their priors and recalibrate their proposed explanations in a constant back-and-forth engagement with data. The quest for a coherent macro-analytical narrative in Comparative Historical Analysis thus necessitates the recognition of the benefits of combining deductive inspiration and inductive casework.
