Top Secret America. OMFG Exogenous Variation! Or, Can You Find Good Nails When You Find an Indonesian Politics Hammer. I am teaching the Government department’s Comparative Methods course in the upcoming semester, and that has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the newest trends (or, maybe, fads) in empirical political science.
One stands out: experimental or quasi-experimental research designs that promise that we can have clean identification of causal relationships that matter for politics. This post is about the pernicious things that can happen when we find a quasi-experiment, and their consequences for contemporary Indonesian political studies. For non-political scientists, let me explain some terms.